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BOOK 89 1.783.T588R Y c. 1
TOLSTOI # RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
3 T1S3 00EDEM20 fl
The Russian
Revolution
BY
LEO TOLSTOY.
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THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
printed by
Love & Malcomson, Ltd.,
4 & 5, Dean Street, High Holborn,
London, W.C,
The Russian
Revolution
BY
Leo Tolstoy.
I. The Meaning of the Russian Revolution.
Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude.
2. What's to be done ? Translated by Aylmer Maude.
3. An Appeal to Russians.
Translated by Aylmer Maude*
4. Letter to a Chinese Gentleman.
Translated by V. Tchertkoff and E.A.
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V. TCHERTKOFF, Editor.
1907.
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CHRISTCHURCH, HANTS.
Letter from Leo Tolstoy
TO
THE FREE AGE PRESS.
Dear Friends,
I have received the first issues of your books, booklets and
leaflets containing my writings, as well as the statements con-
cerning the objects and plan of " The Free Age Press."
The publications are extremely neat and attractive, and —
what to me appears most important — very cheap, and therefore
quite accessible to the great public, consisting of the working
classes.
I also warmly sympathise with the announcement on your
translations that no rights are reserved. Being well aware of all
the extra sacrifices and practical difficulties that this involves for
a publishing concern at the present day, I particularly desire to
express my heartfelt gratitude to the translators and participators
in your work, who, in generous compliance with my objection to
copyright of any kind, thus help to render your English version of
my writings absolutely free to all who may wish to make use of it.
Should I write anything more which I may consider worthy
of publication, I will with great pleasure forward it to you without
delay.
With heartiest wishes for the further success of your efforts.
LEO TOLSTOY.
Moscow,
2^tk December^ 1900.
The Meaning of the Russian
Revolution.
" We live in glorious times. . . Was there ever so much to do ? Our
age is a revolutionary one in the best sense of the word— not of physical but
moral revolution. Higher ideas of the social state, and of human perfection,
are at work. I shall not live to see the harvest, but to sow in faith is no
mean privilege or happiness." — W. E. Channing.
" For the worshippers of utility there is no morality except the morality of
profit, and no religion but the religion of material welfare. They found the
body of man crippled and exhausted by want, and in their ill-considered zeal
they said : ' Let us cure this body ; and when it is strong, plump, and well
nourished, its soul will return to it.' But I say that that body can only be
cured when its soul has been cured. In it lies the root of the disease, and the
bodily ailments are but the outward signs of that disease. Humanity
to-day is dying for lack of a common faith : a common idea uniting earth to
heaven, the universe to God.
" From the absence of this spiritual religion, of which but empty forms and
lifeless formularies remain, and from a total lack of a sense of duty and a
capacity for self-sacrifice, man, like a savage, has fallen prostrate in the dust,
and has set up on an empty altar the idol ' utility.' Despots and the Princes
of this world have become his High Priests ; and from them has come the
revolting formulary : ' Each for his own alone ; each for himself alone.' "
— Mazzini.
" When He saw the multitude, He was moved with compassion for them,
because they were distressed and scattered, as sheep not having a shepherd.',
—Matt, ix, 36.
A Revolution is taking place in Russia, and all the world is
following it with eager attention, guessing and trying to foresee
whither it is tending, and to what it will bring the Russian people.
To guess at and to foresee this, may be interesting and important
to outside spectators watching the Russian Revolution, but for us
Russians, who are living in this Revolution and making it, the
chief interest lies not in guessing what is going to happen, but in
2 THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
defining as clearly and firmly as possible what we must do in these
immensely important, terrible, and dangerous times in which we
live.
Every Revolution is a change of a people's relation towards
Power."^
Such a change is now taking place in Russia, and we, the
whole Russian people, are accomplishing it.
Therefore to know how we can and should change our relation
towards Power, we must understand the nature of Power : what it
consists of, how it arose, and how best to treat it
Always and among all nations the same thing has occurred.
Among people occupied with the necessary work natural to all
men, of providing food for themselves and their families, by the
chase (hunting animals), or as herdsmen (nomads), or by agri-
culture, there appeared men of their own or another nation, who
forcibly seized the fruit of the workers' toil f first robbing, then
enslaving them, and exacting from them either labour or tribute,
This used to happen in old times, and still happens in Africa and
Asia. And always and everywhere the workers (occupied with
their accustomed, unavoidably necessary, and unremitting task
(their struggle with nature to feed themselves and rear their
children) though by far more numerous and always more moral
than their conquerors, submitted to them and fulfilled their
demands.
They submitted because it is natural to all men (and especially
to those engaged in a serious struggle with nature to support
themselves and their families) to dislike strife with other men ; and
* The word Power occurs very frequently in this aiticle, and is, as it were,
a pivot on which it turns. We have been tempted in different places to
translate it (the Russian word is vlast) by "government," "authorities,'' "force"
or " violence " according to the context. But the unity of the article is better
maintained by letting a single English word represent the one Russian word,
and we have followed this principle as far as possible, (Zr^x/zj.)
THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION. 3
feeling this aversion, they preferred to endure the consequences
of the violence put upon them, rather than to give up their
necessary, customary, and beloved labour.
There were, certainly, none of those contracts whereby Hugo
Grotius and Rousseau explain the relations between the subdued
and their subduers. Neither was there, nor could there be, any
agreement as to the best way of arranging social life, such as
Herbert Spencer imagines in his " Principles of Sociology " ; but
it happened in the most natural way, that when one set of men
did violence to another set, the latter preferred to endure not
merely many hardships, but often even great distress, rather than
face the cares and efforts necessary to withstand their oppressors ;
more especially as the conquerors took on themselves the duty of
protecting the conquered people against internal and external dis-
turbers of the peace. And so the majority of men, occupied with
the business necessary to all men and to all animals (that of
feeding themselves and their families) not only endured the
unavoidable inconveniences and hardships, and even the cruelty, of
their oppressors, without fighting, but submitted to them and
accepted it as a duty to fulfil all their demands.
When speaking about the formation of primitive communities
the fact is always forgotten, that not only the most numerous and
most needed, but also the most moral, members of society were
always those who by their labour keep all the rest alive ; and that
to such people it is always more natural to submit to violence and
to bear all the hardships it involves, than to give up the
necessaiy work of supporting themselves and their families In
order to fight against oppression. It is so now, when we see the
people of Burmah, the Fellahs of Egypt, and the Boers, surrender-
ing to the English, and the Bedouins to the French ; and in olden
tim^es it was even more so.
Latterly, in the curious and widely diffused teaching called the
Science of Sociology, it has been asserted that the relations
between the members of human society have been, and are, depen-
dent on economic conditions, But to assert this is merely to
4 THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
substitute for the clear and evident cause of a phenomenon one of
its effects. The cause of this or that economic condition always
was (and could not but be) the oppression of some men by others.
Economic conditions are a result of violence, and cannot therefore
be the cause of human relations. Evil men — the Cains — who
loved idleness and were covetous, always attacked good men — the
Abels — the tillers of the soil, and by killing them or threatening
to kill them, profited by their toil. The good, gentle, and
industrious people, instead of fighting their oppressors, considered
it best to submit : partly because they did not wish to fight, and
partly because they could not do so without interrupting their
work of feeding themselves and their neighbours. On this
oppression of the good by the evil, and not on any economic
conditions, all existinc^ human societies have been, and still are,
based and built.
II.
From the most ancient times, and among all the nations of the
earth, the relations of the rulers to the ruled have been based on
violence. But this relation, like everything else in the world, was
and is continually changing. It changes from two causes. First
because the more secure their power becomes and the longer it
lasts, the more do those in power (the leisured classes who have
power) grow depraved, unreasonable and cruel, and the more
injurious to their subjects do their demands become. Secondly,
because as those in power grow more depraved, their subjects see
more and more clearly the harm and folly of submitting to such
depraved power.
And those in power always become depraved : firstly, because
such people, immoral by nature, and preferring idleness and
violence to work, having grasped power and used it to satisfy
their lusts and passions, give themselves up more and more to
these passions and vices; and secondly, because lusts and passions,
tHE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION. 5
which in the case of ordinary men cannot be gratified without
meeting with obstacles, not only do not meet such obstacles and
do not arouse any condemnation in the case of those who rule,
but on the contrary are applauded by all who surround them.
The latter generally benefit by the madness of their masters ; and
besides, it pleases them to imagine that the virtues and
wisdom to which alone 'it is natural for reasonable men to submit
are to be found in the men to whom they submit ; and therefore,
the vices of those in power are lauded as if they were virtues, and
grow to terrible proportions.
Consequently the folly and vice of the crowned and uncrowned
rulers of the nations have reached such appalling dimensions as
were reached by the Neros, Charleses, Henrys, Louis, Johns,
Peters, Catherines, and Marats.
Nor is this all. If the rulers were satisfied with their personal
debauchery and vices they would not do so much harm ; but idle,
satiated, and depraved men, such as rulers were and are, must have
something to live for — must have some aims and try to attain them.
And such men can have no aim except to get more and more
fame. All other passions soon reach the limits of satiety. Only
ambition has no limits, and therefore almost all potentates always
strove and strive after fame, especially military fame, the only
kind attainable by depraved men unacquainted with, and incapable
of, real work. For the wars devised by the potentates, money,
armies and, above all, the slaughter of men, are necessary ; and in
consequence of this the condition of the ruled becomes harder and
harder, and at last the oppression reaches a point at which the
ruled can no longer continue to submit to the ruling power, but
must try to alter their relation towards it.
III.
■ Such is one reason of alteration in the relations between the
rolers and the ruled. Another still more important reason of
6 THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
this change is that the ruled — believing in the rights of the power
above them and accustomed to submit to it — ^as knowledge spreads
and their moral consciousness becomes enlightened, begin to see
and feel not only the ever increasing material harmfulness of this
rule, but also that to submit to such power is becoming immoral.
It was possible five hundred or a thousand years ago for people,
in obedience to their rulers, to slaughter whole nations for the sake
of conquest, or for dynastic or religio-fantastic aims to behead,
torture, quarter, encage, destroy and enslave whole nations. But
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, subjugated people, en-
lightened by Christianity or by the humanitarian teachings which
have grown up out of it, can no longer without pangs of conscience
submit to the powers which demand that they should participate in
the slaughter of men defending their freedom (as was done in
the Chinese, Boer, and Philippine wars) and can no longer with
quiet consciences, as formerly, know themselves to be participators
in the deeds of violence and the executions which are being
committed by the Governments of their countries.
So that force-using power destroys itself in two ways.
It destroys itself through the ever-growing depravity of those in
authority, and the consequent continually-increasing burden borne
by the ruled ; and through its ever-increasing deviation from the
ever developing moral perception of the ruled. Therefore, where
force-using power exists, a moment must inevitably come when
the relation of the people towards that power must change. This
moment may come sooner or later according to the degree and the
rapidity of the corruption of the rulers, to the amount of their
cunning, to the quieter or more restless temperament of the people,
and even from their geographical position helping or hindering the
intercourse of the people among themselves ; but sooner or later
that moment must inevitably come to all nations.
To the Western nations, which arose on the ruins of the Roman
Empire, that moment came long ago. The struggle of people
against Government began even in Rome ; continued in all the
States that succeeded Rome, and still goes on. To the Eastern
THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION. ^
nations : Turkey, Persia, India, China, that moment has not yet
arrived. For the Russian people, it has now come.
The Russian people are to-day confronted by the dreadful choice
of either, like the Eastern nations, continuing to submit to their
unreasonable and depraved Government in spite of all the misery
it has inflicted upon them ; or, as all the Western nations have done,
realising the evil of the existing Government, upsetting it by
force, and establishing a new one.
Such a choice seems quite natural to the non-labouring classes
of Russia, who are in touch with the upper and prosperous classes
of the Western nations and consider the military might, the
industrial, commercial and technical improvements, and that
external glitter to which the Western nations have attained under
their altered Governments, to be a great good.
IV.
The majority of the Russian non-labouring classes are quite
convinced that the Russian people at this crisis can do nothing
better than follow the path the Western nations have trodden and
are still treading : that is to say, fight the power, limit it, and
place it more and more in the hands of the whole people.
Is this opinion right, and is such action good ?
Have the Western nations, travelling for centuries along that
path, attained what they strove for ? Have they freed themselves
from the evils they wished to be rid of?
The Western nations, like all others, began by submitting to
the power which demanded their submission : choosing to submit
rather than to fight. But that power, in the persons of the
Charleses (the Great and the Fifth) the Philips, Louis, and Henry
the Eighths, becoming more and more depraved, reached such a
condition that the Western nations could no longer endure it^
The Western nations, at different times, revolted against their
rulers and fought them. This struggle took place in different
8 THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
forms, at different periods, but always found expression in the same
ways : in civil wars, robberies, murders, executions, and finished
with the fall of the old power and the accession of a new one.
And when the new power became as oppressive to the people as
that which had been overthrown, it too was upset, and another new
one was put in its place, which by the same unalterable nature of
power, became in due course as harmful as its predecessors. Thus,
for instance, in France there were eleven changes of power within
eighty years : the Bourbons, the Convention, the Directory,
Bonaparte, the Empire, again the Bourbons, a Republic, Louis
Philippe, again a Republic, again a Bonaparte, and again a
Republic. The substitution of new powers for old ones took place
among other nations too, though not so rapidly as in France.
These changes in most cases did not improve the condition of the
people, and therefore those who made these changes could not help
coming to the conclusion that the misery they suffered did not so
much depend on the nature of the persons in power as on the fact
that a few persons exercised power over many. And therefore
the people tried to render the power harmless by limiting it. And
such limitation was introduced in several countries in the form of
elected Chambers of Representatives.
But the men who limited the arbitrariness of the rulers and
found the Assemblies, becoming themselves possessors of
power, naturally succumbed to the depraving influence which
accompanies power, and to which the autocratic rulers had suc-
cumbed. These men, becoming sharers in power even though not
singly, perpetrated, jointly or separately, the same kind of evil, and
became as great a burden on the people as the autocratic rulers
had been. Then, to limit the arbitrariness of power still more,
monarchical power was abolished altogether in some countries, and
a Government was established chosen by the whole people.
In this way Republics were instituted in France, America and
Switzerland ; and the Referendum and the Initiative were intro-
duced, giving every member of the community the possibility of
interfering and participating in legislation.
THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION. 9
But the only effect of all these measures was that the citizens
of these States, participating more and more in power, and being
more and more diverted from serious occupations, grew more and
more depraved. The calamities from which the people suffered
remain, however, exactly the same under Constitutional, Mon-
archical, or Republican Governments, with or without Referen-
dums.
Nor could it be otherwise, for the idea of limiting power by the
participation in power of all who are subject to it is unsound
at its very core, and self-contradictory.
If one man with the aid of his helpers rules over all, it is un-
just, and in all likelihood such rule will be harmful to the people.
The same will be the case when the minority rules over the
majority. But the power of the majority over the minority also
fails to secure a just rule ; for we have no reason to believe that
the majority participating in government is wiser than the minority
that avoids participation.
To extend the participation in government to all, as might be
done by still greater extension of the Referendum and the
Initiative, would only mean that everybody would be fighting
everybody else.
That man should have over his fellows a power founded on
violence, is evil at its source ; and no kind of arrangement that
maintains the right of man to do violence to man, can cause evil to
cease to be evil.
Therefore, among all nations, however they are ruled, whether
by the most despotic or most democratic Governments, the chief
and fundamental calamities from which the people suffer, remain
the same : the same ever-increasing, enormous budgets, the
same animosity towards their neighbours, necessitating military
preparations and armies ; the same taxes ; the same State and
private monopolies ; the same depriving the people of the right to
use the land (which is given to private owners) ; the same
enslaving of subject races ; the same constant threatenings of war ;
10 THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
and the same wars, destroying the lives of men and undermining
their morality.
V.
It is true that the Representative Governments of Western
Europe and America — Constitutional Monarchies as well as
Republics — have uprooted some of the external abuses practised
by the representatives of power, and have made it impossible
that the holders of power should be such monsters as were
the different Louis, Charleses, Henrys and Johns. (Although
in representative Government not only is it possible that power
will be seized by cunning, immoral and artful mediocrities, such as
various Prime Ministers and Presidents have been, but the
construction of those Governments is such, that only that kind
of people can obtain power.) It is true that representative
Governments have abolished such abuses as the lettres de cachet^
have removed restrictions on the press, have stopped religious
persecutions and oppressions, have submitted the taxation of the
people to discussion by their representatives, have made the
actions of the Government public and subject to criticism, and have
facilitated the rapid development in those countries of all sorts
of technical improvements giving great comfort to the life of rich
citizens and great military power to the State. So that the
nations which have representative government have doubtless
become more powerful industrially, commercially and in military
matters, than despotically governed nations, and the lives of their
leisured classes have certainly become more secure, comfortable,
agreeable and aesthetic than they used to be. But is the life of
the majority of the people in those countries more secure, freer,
or, above all, more reasonable and moral ?
I think not.
Under the despotic power of one man, the number of persons
who come under the corrupting influence of power and live on the
labour of others, is limited, and consists of the despot's close
THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION, ii
friends, assistants, servants and flatterers, and of their helpers.
The infection of depravity is focussed in the Court of the despot,
whence it radiates in all directions.
Where power is limited, i.e. where many persons take part
in it, the number of centres of infection is augmented, for everyone
who shares power has his friends, helpers, servants, flatterers and
relations.
Where there is universal suffrage, these centres of infection are
still more diffused. Every voter becomes the object of flattery
and bribery. The character of the power itself is also changed.
Instead of power founded on direct violence, we get a monetary
power, also founded on violence, not directly, but through a
complicated transmission.
So that under representative Governments, instead of one or a
few centres of depravity, we get a large number of such centres — -
that is to say, there springs up a large class of people living idly
on others' labour, the class called the " bourgeois," i.e. people who,
being protected by violence, arrange for themselves easy and
comfortable lives, free from hard work.
But as, when arranging an easy and pleasant life not only
for a Monarch and his Court, but for thousands of little kinglets,
many things are needed to embellish and to amuse this idle life,
it results that whenever power passes from a despotic to a
representative Government, inventions appear, facilitating the
supply of objects that add to the pleasure and safety of the lives of
the wealthy classes.
To produce all these objects, an ever-increasing number of
working men are drawn away from agriculture, and have their
capacities directed to the production of pleasing trifles used by the
rich, or even to some extent by the workers themselves. So there
springs up a class of town workers so situated as to be in
complete dependence on the wealthy classes. The number of
these people grows and grows the longer the power of representative
Government endures, and their condition becomes worse and worse.
In the United States, out of a population of seventy millions, ten
12 THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
millions are proletarians, and the relation between the well-to-do
and the proletariat classes is the same in England, Belgium and
France. The number of men exchanging the labour of
producing objects of primary necessity for the labour of producing
objects of luxury is ever increasing in those countries. It clearly
follows that the result of such a trend of affairs must be the ever
greater overburdening of that diminishing number which has to
support the luxurious lives of the ever increasing number of idle
people. Evidently, such a way of life cannot continue.
What is happening is as though there were a man whose body
went on increasing in weight while the legs that supported it grew
continually thinner and weaker. When the support had vanished
the body would have to fall.
VI.
The Western nations, like all others, submitted to the power
of their conquerors only to avoid the worry and sin of fighting.
But when that power bore too heavily upon them, they began to
fight it, though still continuing to submit to power, which they
regarded as a necessity. At first only a small part of the nation
shared in the fight ; then, when the struggle of that small part
proved ineffectual, an ever greater and greater number entered into
the conflict, and it ended by the majority of the people of those
nations (instead of freeing themselves from the worry and sin of
fighting) sharing in the wielding of power ; the very thing they
wished to avoid when they first submitted to power. The
inevitable result of this was the increase of the depraving influence
that comes of power, an increase not affecting a small number of
persons only, as had been the case under a single ruler, but
affecting all the members of the community. (Steps are now
being taken to subject women also to it.)
Representative Government and Universal Suffrage resulted in
every possessor of a fraction of power being exposed to all the evil
THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION. 13
attached to power : bribery, flattery, vanity, self-conceit, idleness
and, above all, immoral participation in deeds of violence. Every
member of Parliament is exposed to all these temptations in a yet
greater degree. Every Deputy always begins his career of power
by befooling people, making promises he knows he will not keep ;
and when sitting in the House he takes part in making laws that
are enforced by violence. It is the same with all Senators and
Presidents. Similar corruption prevails in the election of a
President. In the United States the election of a President costs
millions to those financiers who know that when elected he will
maintain certain monopolies or import duties advantageous to
them, on various articles, which will enable them to recoup the
cost of the election a hundredfold.
And this corruption, with all its accompanying phenomena —
the desire to avoid hard work and to benefit by comforts and
pleasures provided by others ; interests and cares, inaccessible to
a man engaged in work, concerning the general business of the
State ; the spread of a lying and inflvimmatory press ; and, above
all, animosity between nation and nation, class and class, man and
man — has e^rown and f^rown, till it has reached such dimensions
that the struggle of all men against their fellows has become so
habitual a state of things, that Science (the Science that is engaged
in condoning all the nastiness done by men) has decided that the
struggle and enmity of all against all is a necessary, unavoidable
and beneficent condition of human life.
That peace, which to the ancients who saluted each other with
the words " Peace be unto you ! " seemed the greatest of blessings,
has now quite disappeared from among the Western peoples ; and
not only has it disappeared, but by the aid of science, men try to
assure themselves that not in peace, but in the strife of all against
all, lies man's highest destiny.
And really, among the Western nations, an unceasing industrial,
commercial and military strife is continually waged j a strife of
State against State, class against class, Labour against Capital,
party against party, man against man.
14 THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
Nor is this all. The chief result of this participation of all men
in power is, that men being more and more drawn away from
direct work on the land, and more and more involved in diverse
ways of exploiting the labour of others, have lost their indepen-
dence and are forced by the position they live in to lead immoral
lives. Having neither the desire nor the habit of living by tilling
their own land, the Western nations were forced to obtain their
means of subsistence from other countries. They could do this
only in two ways : by fraud, that is, by exchanging things for the
most part unnecessary or depraving, such as alcohol, opium,
weapons, for the foodstuffs indispensable to them ; or by violence,
that is, robbing the people of Asia and Africa wherever they saw
an opportunity of doing this with impunity,
Such is the position of Germany^ Austria, Italy, France, the
United States, and especially Great Britain, which is held up as an
example for the imitation and envy of other nations. Almost all
the people of these nations, having become conscious participators
in deeds of violence, devote their strength and attention to the
activities of Government, and to industry and to commerce, v/hich
aim chiefly at satisfying the demands of the rich for luxuries ; and
they subjugate (partly by direct force, partly by money) the
agricultural people both of their own and of foreign countries, who
have to provide them with the necessaries of life.
Such people form a majority in some nations ; in others they are
as yet only a minority ; but the percentage of men living on the
labour of others grows uncontrollably and very rapidly, to the
detriment of those who still do reasonable, agricultural work. So
that a majority of the people of Western Europe are already in the
condition (the United States are not so yet, but are being
irresistibly drawn towards it) of not being able to subsist by their
own labour on their own land. They are obliged in one way or
another, by force or fraud, to take the necessaries of life from other
people who still do their own labour. And they get these
necessaries either by defrauding foreign nations, or by gross
violence,
THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION. 15
From this it necessarily results that trade, aiming chiefly at
satisfying the demands of the rich, and of the richest of the rich
(that is, the Government) directs its chief powers, not to improving
the means of tilling the soil, but to making it possible by the aid
of machines to somehow till large tracts of land (of which the
people have been deprived), to manufacturing finery for women,
building luxurious palaces, producing sweetmeats, toys, motor-cars
tobacco, wines, delicacies, medicines, enormous quantities of printed
matter, guns, rifles, powder, unnecessary railways, and so forth.
And as there is no end to the caprices of men when they are
met not by their own labour but by that of others, industry is
more and more diverted to the production of the most unnecessary,
stupid, depraving products, and draws people more and more from
reasonable work ; and no end can be foreseen to these inventions
and preparations for the amusement of idle people, especially as
the stupider and more depraving an invention is — such as the use
of motors in place of animals or of one's own legs, railways to go
up mountains, or armoured automobiles armed with quick-firing
guns — the more pleased and proud of them are both their
inventors and their possessors.
VII.
The longer representative Government lasted and the more it
extended, the more did the Western nations abandon agriculture
and devote their mental and physical powers to manufacturing and
trading in order to supply luxuries to the wealthy classes, to
enable the nations to fight one another, and to deprave the
undepraved. Thus, in England, which has had representative
Government longest, less than one-seventh of the adult male
population are now employed in agriculture, in Germany 0.45 of the
population, in France one-half, and a similar number in other States.
So that at the present time the position of these States is such, that
even if they could free them.selves from the calamity of proletarian-
i6 THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
ism, they could not support themselves independently of other
countries. All these nations are unable to subsist by their own
toil ; and, just as the proletariat are dependent on the well-to-do
classes, so are they completely dependent on countries that
support themselves and are able to sell them their surplus : such
as India, Russia or Australia. England supports from its own
land less than a fifth of its population ; and Germany less than half,
as is the case with France and with other countries ; and the
condition of these nations becomes year by year more dependent
on the food supplied from abroad.
In order to exist, these nations must have recourse to the
deceptions and violence called in their language "acquiring
markets " and " Colonial policy ; " and they act accordingly,
striving to throw their nets of enslavement farther and farther to
all ends of the earth, to catch those who are still leading rational
lives. Vying with one another, they increase their armaments
more and more, and more and more cunningly, under various
pretexts, seize the land of those who still live rational lives, and
force these people to feed them.
Till now they have been able to do this. But the limit to the
acquirement of markets, to the deception of buyers, to the sale of
unnecessary and injurious articles, and to the enslavement of
distant nations, is already apparent. The peoples of distant
lands are themselves becoming depraved : are learning to make
for themselves all those articles which the Western nations
supplied them with, and are, above all, learning the not very
cunning science of arming themselves, and of being as cruel as
their teachers.
So that the end of such immoral existence is already in sight.
The people of the Western nations see this coming, and feeling
unable to stop in their career, comfort themselves (as people half
aware that they are ruining their lives always do) by self-deception
and blind faith ; and such blind faith is spreading more and more
widely among the majority of Western nations. This faith is a
belief that those inventions and improvements for increasing the
THE MEANING OF THE RIJSSIAN REVOLUTION. ii
comforts of the wealthy classes and for fighting (that is, slaughter-
ing men) which the enslaved masses for several generations have
been forced to produce, are something very important atid almost
holy, called, in the language of those who uphold such a mode of
life, "culture," or even more grandly, "civilisation."
As every creed has a science of Its own, so this faith in
"civilisation" has a science — Sociology, the one aim of which is to
justify the false and desperate position in which the people of the
Western world now find themselves. The object of this science is
to prove that all these inventions: ironclads, telegraphs, nitro-
glycerine bonibs, photographs, electric railways, and all sorts of
similar foolish and nasty inventions that stupefy the people and
are designed to increase the comforts of the idle classes and to
protect them by force, not only represent something good, but ev^en
something sacred, predetermined by supreme unalterable laws; and
that, therefore, the depravity they call " civilisation " is a necessary
condition of human life, and must inevitably be adopted by all
mankind.
And this faith is just as blind as any other faith, and just as
unshakable and self-assured.
Any other position may be disputed and argued about ; but
" civilisation " — meaning those inventions and those forms of life
among which we are living, and all the follies and nastiness which
we produce — is an indubitable blessing, beyond all discussion.
Everything that disturbs faith in civilisation is a lie; everything
that supports this faith is sacred truth.
This faith and its attendant science cause the Western nations
not to wish to see or to acknowledge that the ruinous path they are
following leads to inevitable destruction. The so-called " most
advanced " among them, cheer themselves with the thought that
without abandoning this path they can reach, not destruction,
but the highest bliss. They assure themselves that, by again
employing violence such as brought them to their present ruinous
condition, somehow or other, from among people now striving to
obtain the greatest material, animal welfare for themselves, men
i8 THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
(influenced by Socialist doctrines) will suddenly appear, who will
wield power without being depraved by it, and will establish an
order of things in which people accustomed to a greedy, selfish
struggle for their own profit, will suddenly grow self-sacrificing,
and all work together for the common good, and share alike.
But this creed, having no reasonable foundation, has lately
more and more lost credibility among thinking people ; and is
held only by the labouring masses, whose eyes it diverts from the
miseries of the present, giving them some sort of hope of a blissful
future.
Such is the common faith of the majority of the Western
nations, drawing them towards destruction. And this tendency is
so strong that the voices of the wise among them, such as
Rousseau, Lamennais, Carlyle, Ruskin, Channing, W. L. Garrison,
Emerson, Herzen and Edward Carpenter, leave no trace in the
consciousness of those who, though rushing towards destruction,
do not wish to see and admit it.
And it is to travel this path of destruction that the Russian
people are now invited by European politicians, who are delighted
that one more nation should join them in their desperate plight.
And frivolous Russians urge us to follow this path, considering it
much easier and simpler, instead of thinking with their own heads,
slavishly to imitate what the Western nations did centuries ago,
before they knew whither it would lead.
VIII.
Submission to violence brought both the Eastern nations (who
continue to submit to their depraved oppressors) and the Western
nations (who have spread power and its accompanying depravity
among the masses of the people) not only to great misfortunes, but
also to an unavoidable collision between the Western and the
Eastern nations ; which now threatens them both with still
greater calamities.
THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION. 19
The Western nations, besides their distress at home and the
corruption of the greater part of their population by participation
in power, have been led to the necessity of seizing by force or
fraud the fruits of the labour of the Eastern nations for their
own consumption ; and this by certain methods they have devised
called " civilisation," they succeeded in doing until the Eastern
nations learnt the same methods. The Eastern nations, or the
majority of them, still continue to obey their rulers, and, lagging
behind the Western nations in devising things needed for war, were
forced to submit to them.
But some ot them are already beginning to acquire the
depravity or " civilisation " which the Europeans are teaching
them ; and, as the Japanese have shown, they can easily assimilate
all the shallow, cunning methods of an immoral and cruel
civilisation, and are preparing to withstand their oppressors by the
same means that these employ against them.
And now the Russian nation, standing between the two — •
having partially acquired Western methods, yet till now continuing
to submit to its Government — is placed, by fate itself, in a position
in which it must stop and think : seeing on one side the miseries
to which, like the Eastern nations, it has been brought by
submission to a despotic Power ; and on the other hand, seeing
that among the Western nations the limitation of power and its
diffusion among the people, has not remedied the miseries of the
people, but has only depraved them and put them in a position in
which they have to live by deceiving and robbing other nations*
And so the Russian people must naturally alter its attitude
towards power, but not as the Western nations have done.
The Russian nation now stands, like the hero of the fairy-tale,
at the parting of two roads, both leading to destruction.
It is impossible for the Russian nation to continue to submit
to its Government. It is impossible, because having freed itself
frorri the prestige which has hitherto enveloped the Russian
Government, and having once understood that most of the miseries
suffered by the people are caused by the Government, the Russian
20 THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
people cannot cease to be aware of the cause of the calamities they
suffer, or cease to desire to free themselves from it.
Besides, the Russian people cannot continue to submit to the
Government, because now a Government — such a Government
as gives security and tranquillity to a nation — no longer exists in
reality. There are two envenomed and contending parties, but no
Government to which it is possible quietly to submit.
For Russians now to continue to submit to their Government,
would mean to continue not only to bear the ever-increasing
calamities which they have suffered and are suffering : land-hunger,
famine, heavy taxes, cruel, useless and devastating wars ; but also
and chiefly it would mean taking part in the crimes this
Government, in its evidently useless attempts at self-defence, is
now perpetrating.
Still less reasonable v/ould it be for the Russian people to
enter on the path of the Western nations, since the deadliness of
that path is already plainly demonstrated. It would be evidently
irrational for the Russian nation to act so ; for though it was
possible for the Western nations, before they knew where it would
lead them, to choose a path now seen to be false, the Russian
people cannot help seeing and knowing its danger.
Moreover, when they entered on that path, most of the Western
people were already living by trade, exchange and commerce, or by
direct (negro) or indirect slave-owning (as is now the case in
Europe's Colonies) while the Russian nation is chiefly agricultural.
For the Russian people to enter on the path along which the
Westerners went, would mean consciously to commit the same
acts of violence that the Government demands of it (only not for
the Government, but ' against it) : to rob, burn, blow up,
murder, and carry on civil war ; and to commit all these
crimes knowing that it does so no longer in obedience to another's
will, but at its own. And they would at last attain only what has
been attained by the Western nations after centuries of struggle;
they would go on suffering the same chief ills that they now
suffer from : land-hunger, heavy and ever-increasing taxes, national
THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ai
debts, growing armaments, and cruel, stupid wars. More than that,
they would be deprived, like the Western nations, of their chief,
blessing — their accustomed, beloved, agricultural life, and would
drift into hopeless dependence on foreign labour ; and this under
the most disadvantageous conditions, carrying on an industrial and
commercial struggle with the Western nations, with the certainty
of being vanquished. Destruction awaits them on this path and
on that.
IX.
What, then, is the Russian nation to do ?
The natural and simple answer, the direct outcome of the facts
of the case, is to follow neither this path nor that.
To submit neither to the Government which has brought it to
its present wretched state ; nor, imitating the West, to set up a
representative, force-using Government such as those which have
led those nations to a still worse condition.
This simplest and most natural answer is peculiarly suited to
the Russian people at all times, and especially at the present crisis-
For indeed, it is wonderful that a peasant husbandman of Tula,
Saratof, Vologda, or Kharkof Province, without any profit to himself,
and suffering all sorts of misery, such as taxation, law-courts,
deprivation of land, conscription, etc., as a result of his submission
to Government, should till now, contrary to the demands of his
own conscience, have submitted, and should even have aided his
own enslavement : paying taxes, without knowing or asking how
they would be spent, giving his sons to be soldiers, knowing still
less for what the sufferings and death of these so painfully reared
and to him so necessary workers, were wanted.
It would be just as strange, or even stranger, if such
agricultural peasants, living their peaceful, independent life without
any need of a Government, and wishing to be rid of the burdens
they endure at the hands of a violent and to them unnecessary
power, instead of simply ceasing to submit to it, were, by em-
22 THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
ploying violence similar to that from which they suffer, to replace
the old force-using power by a new force-using power, as the
French and English peasants did in their time.
Why ! the Russian agricultural population need only cease to
obey any kind of force-using Government and refuse to participate
in it, and immediately taxes, military service, all official oppressions,
as well as private property in land, and the misery of the working
classes that results from it, would cease of themselves. All these
misfortunes would cease, because there would be no one to inflict
them.
The historic, economic and religious conditions of the Russian
nation place it in exceptionally favourable circumstances for
acting in this manner.
In the first place it has reached the point at which a change
of its old relations towards the existing power has become
inevitable after the wrongfulness of the path travelled by the
Western nations (with whom it has long been in closest connection)
has become fully apparent.
Power in the West has completed its circle. The Western
peoples, like all others, accepted a force-using power at first in
order themselves to escape from the struggles, cares, and sins of
power. When that power became corrupt and burdensome, they
tried to lighten its weight by limiting (that is, by participating in)
it. This participation, spreading out more and more widely, caused
more and more people to share in power ; and finally the majority
of the people (who at first submitted to power to avoid strife and
to escape from participation in power) have had to take part both
in strife and in power, and have suffered the inevitable
accompaniment of power — corruption.
It has become quite clear that the pretended limitation of
power only means changing those in power, increasing their
number, and thereby increasing the amount of depravity, irritation
and anger among men. (The power remains as it was : the power
of a minority of the worse men over a majority of the better.) It
has also become plain that an increase in number of those in
THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION. 23
power has drawn people from the labour on the land natural to all
men, to factory labour for the production (and over-production) of
unnecessary and harmful things, and has obliged the majority of
Western nations to base their lives on the deception and en-
slavement of other nations.
The fact that in our days all this has become quite obvious in
the lives of the Western nations, is the first condition favourable to
the Russian people, who have now reached the moment when they
must change their relation towards Power.
For the Russian people to follow the path the Western nations
have trodden, would be as though a traveller followed a path on
which those who went before him had lost their way, and from
which the most far-seeing of them were already returning.
Secondly : while all the Western nations have more or less
abandoned agriculture and are living chiefly by manufacture and
commerce, the Russian people have arrived at the necessity of
changing their relation towards Power while the immense majority
of them are still living an agricultural life, which they love and
prize so much that most Russians when torn from it, are always
ready to return to it at the first opportunity.
This condition is ot special value for Russians when freeing
themselves from the evils of power ; for while leading an
agricultural life men have the least need of Government ; or rather,
an agricultural life, less than any other, gives a Government
opportunities of interfering with the life of the people. I know
some village communes which emigrated to the Far East and settled
in places where the frontier between China and Russia was not
clearly defined, and lived there in prosperity, disregarding all
Governments, until they were discovered by Russian officials.
Townsmen generally regard agriculture as one of the lowest
occupations to which man can devote himself Yet the enormous
majority of the population of the whole world are engaged in
agriculture, and on it the possibility of existence for all the rest
of the human race depends. So that, in reality, the human race
^re husbandmen. All the rest— ministers, locksmiths, professors,
24 THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
carpenters, artists, tailors, scientists, physicians, generals, soldiers —
are but the servants or parasites of the agriculturist. So that
agriculture, besides being the most moral, healthy, joyful and
necessary occupation, is also the highest of human activities, and
alone gives men true independence.
The enormous majority of Russians are still living this most
natural, moral and independent agricultural life ; and this is the
second, most important, circumstance, which makes it possible and
natural for the Russian people, now that it is faced by the
necessity of changing its relations towards power, to change them
in no other way than by freeing themselves from the evil of all
power, and simply ceasing to submit to any kind of Government.
These are the first two conditions, both of which are external.
The third condition, an inner one, is the religious feeling which
according to the evidence of history, the observation of foreigners
who have studied the Russian people, and especially the inner
consciousness of every Russian, was and is a special characteristic
of the Russian people.
In Western Europe — either because the Gospels printed in
Latin were inaccessible to the people till the time of the
Reformation, and have remained till now inaccessible to the whole
Roman Catholic world, or because of the refined methods which
the Papacy employs to hide true Christianity from the people, or in
consequence of the specially practical character of those nations —
there is no doubt that the essence of Christianity, not only among
Roman Catholics but also among Lutherans, and even more in the
Anglican Church, has long ceased to be a faith directing people's
lives, and has been replaced by external forms, or among the
higher classes by indifference and the rejection of all religion.
For the vast majority of Russians, however — perhaps because the
Gospels became accessible to them as early as the tenth century,
or because of the coarse stupidity of the Russo-Greek Church,
which tried clumsily and therefore vainly to hide the true meaning
of the Christian teaching, or because of some peculiar trait in the
Hessian char^^ter, an4 because of their agricultural life— Christian
THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION. 25
teaching in its practical application has never ceased to be, and
still continues to be, the chief guide of life.
From the earliest times till now, the Christian understanding of
life has manifested, and still manifests, itself among the Russian
people in most various traits, peculiar to them alone. It shows
itself in their acknowledgment of the brotherhood and equality
of all men, of whatever race or nationality ; in their complete
religious toleration ; in their not condemning criminals, but
regarding them as unfortunate; in the custom of begging one
another's forgiveness on certain days ; and even in the habitual use
of a form of the word * forgive ' when taking leave of anybody ; in
the habit not merely of charity towards, but even of respect for
beggars which is common among the people; in the perfect readiness
(sometimes coarsely shown) for self-sacrifice for anything believed
to be religious truth, which was shown and still is shown by those
who burn themselves to death, or castrate themselves, and even (as
in a recent case) by those who bury themselves alive.
The same Christian outlook always appeared in the relation of
the Russian people towards those in power. The people always
preferred to submit to power, rather than to share in it. They
considered, and consider, the position of rulers to be sinful and
not at all desirable. This Christian relation of the Russian
people towards life generally, and especially towards those in
power, is the third and most important condition which makes it
most simple and natural for them at the present juncture to go on
living their customary, agricultural. Christian life, without taking
any part either in the old power, or in the struggle between the old
and the new.
Such are the three conditions, different to those of the Western
nations, in which the Russian people find themselves placed at the
present important time. These conditions, it would seem, ought to
induce them to choose the simplest way out of the difficulty, by not
accepting and not submitting to any kind of force-using power.
Yet the Russian people, at this difficult and important crisis, do
not choose the natural way, but, wavering between Governmental
26 THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
and Revolutionary violence, begin (in the persons of their worst
representatives) to take part in the violence, and seem to be
preparing to follow the road to destruction along which the
Western nations have travelled.
Why is this so ?
X.
What has caused, and still causes, this surprising phenomenon
that people suffering from the abuse of power which they
themselves tolerate and support, do not free themselves in the
most simple and easy way from all the disasters brought about by
power ; that is to say, do not simply cease obeying it ? And not
only do not act thus, but go on doing the very things that deprive
them of physical and mental well-being; that is to say, either
continue to obey the existing power, or establish another similar
force-using power, and obey that ?
V/hy is this so ? People feel that their unhappy position is
the result of violence, and are dimly aware that to get rid of their
misery they need freedom ; but, strange to say, to get rid ot
violence and gain freedom, they seek, invent and use all sorts of
measures: mutiny, change of rulers, alterations of Government
all kinds of Constitutions, new arrangements between different
States, Colonial policies, enrolment of the unemployed, trusts,
social organisations — everything but the one thing that would most
simply, easily, and surely free them from all their distresses : the
refusal to submit to power.
One might think that it must be quite clear to people not
deprived of reason, that violence breeds violence ; that the only
means of deliverance from violence lies in not taking part in it.
This method, one would think, is quite obvious. It is evident
that a great majority of men can be enslaved by a small minority
only if the enslaved themselves take part in their own
enslavement.
THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION. 27
If people are enslaved, it is only because they either fight
violence with violence or participate in violence for their own
personal profit.
Those who neither struggle against violence nor take part in it
can no more be enslaved than water can be cut.
They can be robbed, prevented from moving about, wounded
or killed, but they cannot be enslaved : that is, made to act
against their own reasonable will.
This is true both of individuals and of nations. If the
200,000,000 Hindoos did not submit to the Power which demands
their participation in deeds of violente, always connected with
the taking of human life : if they did not enlist, paid no taxes
to be used for violence, were not tempted by rewards offered by
the conquerors (rewards originally taken from themselves) and
did not submit to the English laws introduced among them, then
neither 50,000 Englishmen, nor all the English in the world, could
enslave India, even if instead of 200,000,000 there were but 1,000
Hindoos. So it is in the cases of Poles, Czechs, Irish, Bedouins,
and all the conquered races. And it is the same in the case of
the workmen enslaved by the capitalists. Not all the capitalists
in the world could enslave the workers if the workmen themselves
did not help, and did not take part in their own enslavement
All this is so evident that one is ashamed to mention it. And
yet people who discuss all other conditions of life reasonably, not
only do not see and do not act as reason dictates in this matter,
but act quite contrary to reason and to their own advantage.
Each one says, " I can't be the first to do what nobody else does.
Let others begin, and then I too will cease to submit to power."
And so says a second, a third, and everybody.
All, under the pretence that no one can begin, instead of acting
in a manner unquestionably advantageous to all, continue to do
what is disadvantageous to everybody, and is also irrational and
contrary to human nature.
No one likes to cease submitting to power, lest he should be
persecuted by power ; yet he well knows that obeying power
28 THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
means being subject to all sorts of the gravest calamities in wars
foreign or civil.
What is the cause of this ?
The cause of it is, that people when yielding to power do not
reason, but act under the influence of something that has always
been one of the most widespread motives of human action, and has
lately been most carefully studied and explained ; it is called
"suggestion" or hypnotism. This hypnotism, preventing people
from acting in accordance with their reasonable nature and their
own interest, and forcing them to do what is unreasonable and
disadvantageous, causes them to believe that the violence perpe-
trated by people calling themselves " the Government ^' is not
simply the immoral conduct of immoral men, but is the action of
some mysterious, sacred Being, called the State, without which
men never have existed (which is quite untrue) and never can
exist.
But how can reasonable beings, men, submit to such a surprising
suggestion, contrary to reason, feeling, and to their own interest ?
The answer to this question is, that not only do children, the
mentally diseased and idiots, succumb to hypnotic influence and
suggestion, but all persons, to the extent to which their religious
consciousness is weakened : their consciousness of their relation to
the Supreme Cause on which their existence depends. And the
majority of the people of our times more and m*ore lack this
consciousness.
The reason that most people of our time lack this consciousness
is that having once committed the sin of submitting to human
power, and not acknowledging this sin to be a sin, but trying to
hide it from themselves, or to justify it, they have exalted the
power to which they submit to such an extent that it has replaced
God's law for them. When human law replaced divine law, men
lost religious consciousness and fell under the governmental
hypnotism, which suggests to them the illusion that those who
enslave them are not simply lost, vicious men, but fire repre^
THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION. 29
sentatives of that mystic Being, the State, without which it is
supposed that men are unable to exist.
The vicious circle has been completed ; submission to Power
has weakened, and partly destroyed, the religious feeling in men ;
and the weakening and cessation of religious consciousness has
subjected them to human power.
The sin of Power began like this : The oppressors said to the
oppressed, "Fulfil what we demand of you; if you disobey,
wc will kill you. But if you submit to us, we will introduce order
and will protect you from other oppressors."
And the oppressed, in order to live their accustomed lives, and
not to have to fight these and other oppressors, seem to have
answered : "Very well, we will submit to you ; introduce whatever
order you choose, we will uphold it ; only let us live quietly,
supporting ourselves and our families."
The oppressors did not recognise their sin, being carried away
by the attractions and advantages of Power. The oppressed
thought it no sin to submit to the oppressors, for it seemed better
to submit than to fight. But there was sin in this submission ;
and as great a sin as that of those who used violence. Had the
oppressed endured all the hardships, taxations and cruelties
without acknowledging the authority of the oppressors to be lawful,
and without promising to obey it, they would not have sinned. But
in the promise to submit to power lay a sin {a fiapr la, error, sin) equal
to that of the wielders of power.
In promising to submit to a force-using power, and in
recognizing it as lawful, there lay a double sin. First, that in
trying to free them.selves from the sin of fighting, those who
submitted condoned that sin in those to whom they submitted ;
and secondly, that they renounced their true freedom (i.e.,
submission to the will of God) by promising always to obey the
power. Such a promise (including as it does the admission of the
possibility of disobedience to God in case the demands of
established power should clash with the laws of God), a promise to
obey the power of man, was a rejection of the will of God ; for the
30 THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
force-using power of the State, demanding from those who submit
to it participation in killing men, in wars, executions and in laws
sanctioning preparations for wars and executions, is based on a
direct contradiction to God's will. Therefore those who submit to
power thereby renounce their submission to the law of God.
One cannot yield a little on one point, and on another maintain
the law of God. It is evident that if in one thing God's law can
be replaced by human law, then God's law is no longer the highest
law incumbent at all times on men ; and if it is not that, i
is nothing.
Deprived of the guidance given by divine law (that is, the
highest capacity of human nature) men inevitably sink to that
lowest grade of human existence where the only motives of their
actions are their personal passions and the hypnotism to which
they are subject. Under such an hypnotic suggestion of the
necessity of obedience to Government, lie all the nations that live
in the unions called States ; and the Russian people are in the
same condition.
This is the cause of that apparently strange phenomenon, that
a hundred millions of Russian cultivators of the soil, needing no
kind of government, and constituting so large a majority that they
may be called the whole Russian nation, do not choose the most
natural and best way out of their present condition (by simply
ceasing to submit to any force-using power) but continue to take
part in the old Government and enslave themselves more and
more ; or, fighting against the old Government, prepare for
themselves a new one which, like the old one, will employ
violence.
XL
We often read and hear discussions as to the causes of the
present excited, restless condition of all the Christian nations,
threatened by all sorts of dangers ; and of the terrible position in^
which the demented, and in part brutalised, Russian people find-
THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION. 31
themselves at present. The most varied explanations are brought
forward ; yet all the reasons can be reduced to one. Men have
forgotten God^ that is to say, they have forgotten their relations to
the infinite Source of Life, forgotten the meaning of life which is
the outcome of those relations, and which consists, first of all, in
fulfilling, for one's own soul's sake, the law given by this Divine
Source. They have forgotten this, because some of them have
assumed a right to rule over men by means of threats of murder ;
and others have consented to submit to these people, and to
participate in their rule. By the very act of submitting, these men
have denied God and exchanged His law for human law.
Forgetting their relation to the Infinite, the majority of men
have descended, in spite of all the subtlety of their mental
achievements, to the lowest grade of consciousness, where they
are guided only by animal passions and by the hypnotism of the
herd.
That is the cause of all their calamities.
Therefore there is but one escape from the miseries with vv^hich
people torment themselves : it lies in re-establishing in themselves
a consciousness of their dependence on God, and thereby
regaining a reasonable and free relation towards themselves and
towards their fellows.
And so it is just this conscious submission to God, and the
consequent abandonment of the sin of power and of submission to
it, that now stands before all nations that suffer from the
consequence of this sin.
The possibility and necessity of ceasing to submit to human
power and of returning to the laws of God, is dimly felt by all
men, and especially vividly by the Russian people just now. And
in this dim consciousness of the possibility and necessity of
re-establishing their obedience to the law of God and ceasing to
obey human power, lies the essence of the movement now taking
place in Russia.
What is happening in Russia is — not, as many people suppose
a rebellion of the people against their Government in order to
33 THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
replace one Government by another ; but a much greater and more
important event. What now moves the Russian people is a dim
recognition of the wrongness and unreasonableness of all violence,
and of the possibility and necessity of basing one's life not on
coercive power, as has been the case hitherto among all nations,
but on reasonable and free agreement.
Whether the Russian nation will accomplish the great task nov/
before it (the task of liberating men from human power
substituted for the will of God) or whether, following the path of
the Western nations, it will lose its opportunity and leave to some
other happier Eastern race the leadership in the great work that
lies before humanity, there is no doubt that at the present day all
nations are becoming more and more conscious of the possibility
of changing this violent, insane and wicked life, for one that shall
be free, rational and good. And what already exists in men's
consciousness will inevitably accomplish itself in real life. For the
will of God must be, and cannot fail to be, realised.
XII.
" But is social life possible without power ? Without power
men would be continually robbing and killing one another, " say
those who believe only in human law. People of this sort are
sincerely convinced that men refrain from crime and live orderly
lives, only because of laws, courts of justice, police, officials, and
armies ; and that without governmental power social life would
become impossible. Men depraved by power fancy that as some
of the crimes committed in the State are punished by the
Government, it is this punishment that prevents men from
committing other possible crimes. But the fact that Government
punishes some crimes does not at all prove that the existence of
law-courts, police, armies, prisons and death-penalties, holds men
back from all the crimes they might commit. That the amount
of crime committed in a society does not at all depend on the
i$^
THE MEANING Of THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION, ss
punitive action of governments, is quite clearly proved by the fact
that when society is in a certain mood, no increase of punitive
measures by Government is able to prevent the perpetration of
most daring and cruel crimes, imperilling the safety of the
community, as has been the case in every Revolution, and as is
now the case in Russia to a most striking degree.
The cause of this is that men, the majority of men (all the
labouring folk) abstain from crimes and live good lives — not
because there are police, armies and executions, but because there
is a moral perception, common to the bulk of mankind, established
by their comnion religious understanding and by the education,
customs and public opinion, founded on that understanding.
This moral conciousness alone, expressed in public opinion,
keeps men from crimes, both in town centres and more especially
in villages, where the majority of the population dwell.
I repeat, that I know many examples of Russian agricultural
communities emigrating to the Far East and prospering there for
several decades. These communes governed themselves, being
unknown to the Government and outside its control, and when
they were discovered by Government agents, the only result was
that they experienced calamities unknown to them before, and
received a new tendency towards the commission of crime.
Not only does the action of Governments not deter men from
crimes ; on the contrary, it increases crime by always disturbing
and lowering the moral standard of society. Nor can this be
otherwise, since always and everywhere a Government, by its very
nature, must put in the place of the highest, eternal, religious law
(not written in books but in the hearts of men, and binding on
every one) its own unjust, man-made laws, the object of which is
neither justice nor the common good of all^ but various
considerations of home and foreign expediency.
Such are all the existing, evidently unjust, fundamental laws
of every Government : laws maintaining the exclusive right of a
minority to the land — the common possession of all ; laws giving
some men a right over the labour of others ; laws compelling men
D
34 THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
to pay money for purposes of murder, or to become soldiers
themselves and go to war; laws establishing monopolies in the sale
of stupefying intoxicants, or forbidding the free exchange of
produce across a certain line called a frontier ; and laws regarding
the execution of men for actions which are not so much immoral,
as simply disadvantageous to those in power.
All these laws, and the exaction of their fulfilment by threats of
violence, the public executions inflicted for the non-fulfilment of
these laws, and above all the forcing of men to take part in wars,
the habitual exaltation of military murders, and the preparation
for them — all this inevitably lowers the moral social conciousnesss
and its expression, public opinion.
So that Governmental activity not only does not support morality,
but, on the contrary, it would be hard to devise a more depraving
action than that which Governments have had, and still have, on
the nations.
It could never enter the head of any ordinary scoundrel to
commit all those horrors ; the stake, the Inquisition, torture, raids,
quarterings, hangings, solitary confinements, murders in war, the
plundering of nations, etc., which have been and still are being
committed, and committed ostentatiously, by all Governments. All
the horrors of Stenka Razin, Pougatchef* and other rebels, were but
results, and feeble imitations, of the horrors perpetrated by the
Johns, Peters, and Birons,+ and that have been and are being perpe-
rated by all Governments. If (which is very doubtful) the action of,
Government does deter some dozens of men from crime, hundreds
of thousands of other crimes are committed only because men are
educated in crime by Governmental injustice and cruelty.
If men taking part in legislation, in commerce, in industries,
living in towns, and in one way or other sharing the advantages of
power, can still believe in the beneficence of that power, people
living on the land cannot help knowing that Government only
* Stenka Razin and Pougatchef were famous Russian rebels of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. {Trans)
t Biron, the favourite of the Empress Anne, ruled Russia for ten year§
(1730-1741). {Trans.)
THE MEANING OF THE RUSSlAH REVOLUTION. 35
causes them all kinds of suffering and deprivation, was never
needed by them and only corrupts those of them who come under
its influence.
So that to try to prove to men that they cannot live without a
Government, and that the injury the thieves and robbers among
them may do is greater than the injury both material and spiritual
which Government continually does by oppressing and corrupting
them, is as strange as it would have been to try to prove to slaves
that it was more profitable for them to be slaves than to be free,
But just as, in the days of slavery, in spite of the obviously
wretched condition the slaves were in, the slave-owners declared
and created a belief that it was good for slaves to be slaves, and
that they would be worse off if they were free (sometimes the slaves
themselves became hypnotised and believed this) so now the
Government, and people who profit by it, argue that Governments
which rob and deprave men are necessary for their well-being, and
men yield to this suggestion.
Men believe in it all, and must continue to do so ; for not
believing in the law of God, they must put their faith in human
law. Absence of human law for them means the absence of all
law ; and life for men who recognise no law, is terrible. Therefore,
for those who do not acknowledge the law of God, the absence of
human law must seem terrible, and they do not wish to be deprived
of it.
This lack of belief in the law of God, is the cause of the
apparently curious phenomenon, that all the theoretical anarchists,
clever and learned men — from Bakounin and Prudhon to Reclus.
Max Stirner and Kropotkin — who prove with indisputable
correctness and justice the unreasonableness and harmfulness of
power, as soon as they begin to speak of the possibility of
establishing a society without that human law which they reject,
fall at once into indefiniteness, verbosity, rhetoric, and quite
unfounded and fantastic hypotheses.
This arises from the fact that none of these theoretic anarchists
accept that law of God common to all men, which it is
36 THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN R£V0LUTI01^.
natural for all to obey ; and without the obedience of men to one
and the same law — human or divine— human society cannot
exist.
Deliverance from human law is only possible on condition
that one acknowledges a divine law common to all men.
XIIL
" But if a primitive agricultural society, like the Russian, cart
live without government," will be said in reply, " what are those,
millions to do who have given up agriculture and are living an
industrial life in towns? We cannot all cultivate the land."
" The only thing every man can be, is an agriculturist," is the
correct reply given by Henry George to this question.
"But if everybody now returned to an agricultural life," it
will again be said, " the civilisation mankind has attained would
be destroyed, and that would be a terrible misfortune ; and
therefore a return to agriculture would be an evil and not a
benefit for mankind."
A certain method exists whereby men justify their fallacies,
and it is this : People, accepting the fallacy into which they have
fallen as an unquestionable axiom, unite this fallacy and all its
effects into one conception, and call it by one word, and then
ascribe to this conception and word a special, indefinite and
mystical meaning. Such conceptions and words are, the Churchy
Science, Justice, tJie State, and Civilization, Thus, the Church
becomes not what it really is, a number of men who have all fallen
into the same error, but a "communion of those v/ho believe rightly."
Justice becomes not a collection of unjust laws framed by certain
men, but the designation of those rightful conditions under
which alone it is possible for men to live. Science becomes not what
it really is : the chance dissertations which at a given time occupy
the minds of idle men, but the only true knov/ledge.
In the same way Civilisation becomes not what it really is : the
THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION. 37
outcome of the activity (falsely and harmfully misdirected by force-
using Governments) of the Western nations, who have succumbed
to the false idea of freeing themselves from violence by violence,
but the unquestionably true way towards the future welfare
of humanity. ** Even if it be true," say the supporters of
civilization, ''that all these inventions, technical appliances and
products of industry, are now only used by the rich and are
inaccessible to working men, and cannot therefore as yet be
considered a benefit to all mankind, this is so only because these
mechanical appliances have not yet attained their full perfection
and are not yet distributed as they should be. When mechanism
is still further perfected, and the workmen are freed from the
power of the Capitalists, and all the works and factories are in
their hands, the machines will produce so much of everything
and it will all be so well distributed, that everybody will have
the use of everything. No one will lack anything, and all will be
happy."
Not to mention the fact that we have no reason to believe
that the working men who now struggle so fiercely with one
another for existence, or even for more of the comforts, pleasures
and luxuries of existence, will suddenly become so just and self-
denying that they will be content to share equally the benefits the
machines are going to give them — leaving that aside — the very
supposition that all these works with their machines, which could
not have been started or continued except under the power of
Government and Capital, will remain as they are, when the power
of Government and Capital have been destroyed, is a quite
arbitrary supposition.
To expect it, is the same as it would have been to expect that
after the emancipation of the serfs on one of the large, luxurious
Russian estates, which had a p.irk, conservatories, arbours, private
theatrical troupe, an orchestra, a picture gallery, stables, kennels
and store-houses filled with different kinds of garments — all these,
things would be in part distributed among the liberated peasants
and in part kept for common us§.
S8 THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
One would think it was evident that on an estate of that kind,
neither the houses, clothes, nor conservatories of the rich proprietor
would be suitable for the liberated peasants, and they would
not continue to keep them up. In the same way, ^hen the
working people are emancipated from the power of Government
and capital, they will not continue to maintain the arrangements
that have arisen under these powers, and will not go to work in
factories and works which could only have come into existence
owing to their enslavement, even if such factories could be
profitable and pleasant for them.
It is true that when the workers are emancipated from slavery
one will regret all this cunning machinery which weaves so much
beautiful stuff so quickly, and makes such nice sweets, looking-
glasses, etc., but, in the same way, after the emancipation of the
serfs one regretted the beautiful race-horses, pictures, magnolias,
musical instruments and private theatres that disappeared. But
just as the liberated serfs bred animals suited to their way of life,
and raised plants they required, and the race-horses and magnolias
disappeared of themselves, so the workm^en, freed from the power
of Government and capital, will direct their labour to quite other
work than at present.
" But it is much more profitable to bake all the bread in one
oven than that everybody should heat his own, and to weave
twenty times as quickly at a factory as on a handloom at
home," say the supporters of civilization, speaking as if men were
dumb cattle for v/hom food, clothing, dwellings, and more or less
labour, were the only questions to solve.
An Australian savage knows very well that it would be more
profitable to build one hut for himself and his wife, yet he erects
two, so that both he and his wife may enjoy privacy. The
Russian peasant knows very decidedly that it is more profitable
for him to live in one house with his father and brothers ; yet he
Separates from them, builds his own cottage, and prefers to bear
privations rather than obey his elders, or quarrel and have
disagreement, " Better but a pot of broth, and one's own master
THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION. 39
be I '* I think the majority of reasonable people will prefer to
clean their own clothes and boots, carry water, and trim their own
lamps, than go to a factory and do obligatory labour for one hour
a day to produce machines that would do all these things.
When coercion is no longer used, nothing of all these fine
machines that polish boots and clean plates, nor even of those that
bore tunnels and impress steel, etc., will probably remain. The
liberated workmen will inevitably let everything that was founded
on their enslavement perish, and will inevitably begin to construct
quite other machines and appliances, with other aims, of other
dimensions, and very differently distributed.
This is so plain and obvious, that men could not help seeing it
if they were not under the influence of the superstition of
civilization.
It is this wide-spread and firmly-fixed superstition that causes
all indications of the falseness of the path the Western nations are
travelling, and all attempts to bring the erring peoples back to a
free and reasonable life, to be rejected, and even to be regarded as
a kind of blasphemy or madness. This blind belief that the life
we have arranged for ourselves is the best possible life, also causes
all the chief agents of civilization — its Government officials
scientists, artists, merchants, manufacturers, and authors— while
making the workers support their idle lives — to overlook their own
sins and to feel perfectly sure that their activity is, not an immoral
and harmful activity (as it really is), but a very useful and
important one, and that they are, therefore, very important people
and of great use to humanity ; and that all the stupid, trifling, and
nasty things produced under their direction, such as cannons,
fortresses, cinematographs, cathedrals, motors, explosive bombs,
phonographs, telegraphs, and steam printing-machines that turn out
mountains of paper printed with nastiness, lies and absurdities, will
remain just the same when the workers are free, and will always
be a great boon to humanity.
Yet to people free from the superstition of civilization, it cannot
but be perfectly obvious that all those conditions of life which
40 THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
among the Western nations are now called " civilization," are
nothing but monstrous results of the vanity of the upper,
governing classes, such as were the productions of the Egyptian,
Babylonian and Roman despots : the pyramids, temples and
seraglios; or such as were the productions of the Russian serf-
owners : palaces, serf-orchestras, private theatrical troupes, artificial
lakes, lace, hunting packs and parks, which the slaves arranged for
their lords.
It is said that if men cease to obey Governments and return to
an agricultural life, all the industrial progress they have attained
will be lost, and that, therefore, to give up obeying Government
and to return to an agricultural life would be a bad thing. But
there is no reason to suppose that a return to agricultural
life, free from Government, would destroy such industries and
achievements as are really useful to mankind, and do not require
the enslavement of men. And if it stopped the production of that
endless number of unnecessary, stupid and harmful things, on
which a considerable portion of humanity is now employed, and
rendered impossible the existence of the idle people who invent
all the unnecessary and harmful things by which they justify their
immoral lives, that does not mean that all that mankind has,
worked out for its welfare would be destroyed. On the contrary
the destruction of everything that is kept up by coercion, would
evoke and promote an intensified production of all those useful
and necessary technical improvements which, without turning men
into machines and spoiling their lives, may ease the labour of the
agriculturists and render their lives more pleasant.
The difference v/ill only be, that when men are liberated from
power and return to agricultural labour, the objects produced by
art and industry will no longer aim at amusing the rich, satisfying
idle curiosity, preparing for human slaughter, preserving useless
and harmful lives at the cost of useful ones, or producing machines
by which a small number of workmen can somehow produce a
great number of things or cultivate a large tract of land ; but they
will aim at increasing the productiveness of the work of those
THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION. 41
labourers who cultivate their own allotments with their own hands,
and help to better their lives without taking them away from the
land or interfering with their freedom,
XIV.
But will people be able to live without obeying some human
power? How will they conduct their common business? What
will become of the different States ? What will happen to Ireland,
Poland, Finland, Algeria, India^ and to all the Colonies ? How
will the nations group themselves ?
Such questions are put by men who are accustomed to think
that the conditions of life of all human societies are decided by the
will and direction of a few individuals, and who therefore imagine
that the knowledge of how future life will shape itself is accessible
to man. Such knowledge, however, never was, nor can be,
accessible.
If the most learned and best educated Roman citizen, accus-
tomed to think that the life of the world was guided by the decrees
of the Roman Senate and Emperors, had been asked what would
become of the Roman Empire in a few centuries : or if he had
himself thought of writing such a book as Bellamy's, you may be
sure that he never could have foretold even approximately, either
the Barbarians, or Feudalism, or the Papacy, or the disintegration
of the peoples and their reunion into large States. The same 13
true of those Utopias, with flying machines, X-rays, electric motors,
and Socialist organizations of life in the twenty-first century,
which are so daringly drawn by the Bellamys, Morrises, Anatole
Frances, and others.
Men cannot know what form social life will take in the future
and more than that, harm results from their thinking they can
know it. For nothing so interferes with the straight current of
their lives as this fancied knowledge of what the future life
of humanity ought to be. The life of individuals as well as of
communities consists only in this — that men and communities con-
42 THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
tinually move towards the unknown ; changing not because certain
men have formed brain-spun plans as to what these changes should
be, but in consequence of a tendency inherent in all men to strive
towards moral perfection, attainable by the infinitely varied activity
of millions and millions of human lives. Therefore the relation in
which men will stand towards one another, and the forms into
which they shape society depend entirely on the inner characters
of men, and not at all on forecasting this or that form of life
which they desire to adopt. Yet those who do not believe in
God's law, always imagine that they can know what the future
state of society should be, and not only define this future state, but
do all sorts of things they themselves admit to be evil, in order to
mould human society to the shape they think it ought to take.
That others do not agree with them, and think that social life
should be quite differently arranged, does not disturb them ; and
having assured themselves that they can know what the future of
society ought to be, they not only decide this theoretically, but
act: fight, seize property, imprison and kill men, to establish the
form in which, according to their ideas, mankind will be happy.
The old argument of Caiaphas, *' It is expedient that one man
should die, and that the whole nation perish not," seems irrefutable
to such people. Of course they must kill, not one man only, but
hundreds and thousands of men, if they are fully assured that the
death of these thousands will give welfare to millions. People who
do not believe in God and His law, cannot but argue thus. Such
people live in obedience only to their passions, to their reasonings,
and to social hypnotism, and have never considered their destiny
of life, nor wherein the real happiness of humanity consists
or, if they have thought about it, they have decided that this
cannot be known. And these people, who do not know wherein
the welfare of a single man lies, imagine that they know, and
know beyond all doubt, what is needed for the welfare of society as
a whole : know it so certainly, that to attain that welfare, as they
understand it, they commit deeds of violence, murders and
executions, which they themselves admit to be evil
THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION. 43
At first it seems strange that men who do not know what they
themselves need, can imagine that they know clearly and indubitably
what the whole community needs ; and yet it is just because they
do not know what they need, that they imagine they know what
the whole community needs.
The dissatisfaction they (lacking all guidance for their lives)
dimly feel, they attribute not to themselves, but to the badness of
the existing forms of social life, which differ from the one they have
invented. And in cares for the rearrangement of society they find
a possibility of escaping from consciousness of the wrongness of
their own lives. That is why those who do not know what to do
with themselves are always particularly sure what ought be done
with society as a whole. The less they know about themselves,
the more sure they are about society. Such men for the most part
are either very thoughtless youths, or are the most depraved of social
leaders, such as the Marats, Napoleons and Bismarcks ; and
that is why the history of the nations is full of most terrible evil-
doings.
The worst effect of this imaginary fore-knowledge of what
society should be, and of this activity directed to the alteration of
society, is that it is just this supposed knowledge and this activity
which more than anything else hinders the movement of the
community along the path natural to it for its true welfare.
Therefore to the question, " What will the lives of the nations
be like which cease to obey power ? " we reply that we not only
do not know, but ought not to suppose that anyone can know.
We do not know in what circumstances these nations will be
placed when they cease to obey power ; but we know indubitably
what each one of us must do, that those conditions of national life
should be the very best. We know, without the least doubt, that
in order to make those conditions the very best, we must first of
all abstain from acts of violence which the existing power
demands of us, as well as from those to which men fighting
against the existing power to establish a new one, invite us ; and
we must therefore not obey any power. We must refuse to
44 THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
submit, not because we know how our life will shape itself in
consequence of our ceasing to obey power, but because submission
to a power that demands that we should break the law of God, is
a sin. This we know beyond doubt, and we also know that as a
consequence of not transgressing God's will and not sinningj
nothing but good can come to us or to the whole world..
XV.
People are prone to believe in the realization of the most
improbable events under the sun. They believe in the possibility
of flying and communicating with the planets, in the possibility of
arranging Socialistic Communes, in spiritualistic communications,
and in many other palpably impossible things ; but they do not
wish to believe that the conception of life in which they and all
who surround them live, can ever be altered.
And yet such changes, even the most extraordinary, are
continually taking place in ourselves, and among those around us,
and among whole communities and nations ; and it is these
changes that constitute the essence of human life.
Not to mention changes that have happened in historic times
in the social consciousness of nations, at present in Russia, before
our very eyes, an apparently astonishing change is taking place
with incredible rapidity in the consciousness of the whole Russian
nation, of which we had no external indication two or three years
ago.
The change only seems to us to have taken place suddenly,
because the preparation for it, which went on in the spiritual region
was not visible. A similar change is still going on in the spiritual
region inaccessible to our observations. If the Russian people
who two years ago thought it impossible to disobey or even to
criticise the existing power, now not only criticise, but are even
preparing to disobey it and to replace it by a new one, why should
we not suppose that in the consciousness of the Russian people
THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION. 4^
another change in their relation towards power — more natural to
them — is now preparing, a change which will consist in their moral
and religious emancipation from power ?
Why may not such a change be possible among any people,
and why not at present among the Russians ? Why, instead of
that irritated, egotistical mood of mutual strife, fear and hatred,
which has now seized all nations, instead of all this preaching of
lies, immorality, and violence now so strenuously circulated
among all nations by newspapers, books, speeches, and actions —
why should not a religious, humane, reasonable, loving mood seize
the minds of all nations, and of the Russian nation in particular,
after all the sins, sufferings and terrors they have lived through: a
state of mind which would make them see all the horror of
submitting to the power under which they live, and feel the joyful
possibility of a reasonable, loving life without violence and without
power ?
Why should not the consciousness of the possibility and
necessity of emancipating themselves from the sin of power, and of
establishing unity among men based on mutual agreement and
on respect and love between man and man, be now ripening, just
as the movement now manifesting itself in the Revolution prepared
by decades of influence tending in one particular direction ?
Some ten or fifteen years ago the gifted French writer, Dumas
fils, wrote a letter to Zola in which he, a talented and intelligent
man chiefly occupied with aesthetic and social questions, when
already old, uttered some strikingly prophetic words. Truly
the spirit of God " bloweth where it listeth " ! This is what he
wrote : —
"The soul, too, is incessantly at work, ever evolving tov/ard light and
truth. And so long as it has not reached full light and conquered the whole
truth, it will continue to torment man.
"Well ! The soul never so harassed man, never so dominated him, as is
dees to-day. It is as though it were in the air we all breathe. The few isolated
souls that had separately desired the regeneration of society have, little by
little, sought one another out, beckoned one another, drawn nearer, united*
comprehended one another, and formed a group, a centre of attraction, toward
46 THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
which others now fly from the four quarters of the globe, like larks toward a
mirror. They have, as it were, formed one collective soul, so that men in
future may realise together, consciously and irresistibly, the approaching union
and steady progress of nations that were but recently hostile one to another.
This new soul I find and recognise in events seemingly most calculated to deny it.
"These armaments of all nations, these threats their representatives address
to one another, this recrudescence of race persecutions, these hostilities among
compatriots, are all things of evil aspect, but not of evil augury. They are the
last convulsions of that which is about to disappear. The social body is like
the human body. Disease, in this case, is but a violent effort of the organism
to throw off a morbid and harmful element.
" Those who have profited, and expect for long or or ever to continue to
profit by the mistakes of the past, are uniting to prevent any modification of
existing conditions. Hence these armaments and threats and persecutions ;
but look carefully and you will see that all this is quite superficial. It is
colossal, but hollow. There is no longer any soul in it — the soul has gone
elsewhere ; these millions of armed men who are daily drilled to prepare for a
general war of extermination, no longer hate the men they are expected to
fight, and none of their leaders dares to proclaim this war. As for the appeals,
and even the threatening claims, that rise from the suffering and the oppressed
— a great and sincere pity, recognising their justice, begins at last to respond
from above.
" Agreement is inevitable, and will come at an appointed time, nearer than
is expected.
" I know not if it be because I shall soon leave this earth, and the rays that
are already reaching me from below the horizon have disturbed my sight, but I
believe our world is about to begin to realise the words, * Love one another'
without, however, being concerned whether a man or a God uttered them.
" The spiritual movement one recognises on all sides, and which so many
naive and ambitious men expect to be able to direct, will be absolutely
humanitarian. Mankind, which does nothing moderately, is about to be
seized with a frenzy, a madness, of love. This will not, of course, happen
smoothly or all at once ; it will involve misunderstandings— even sanguinary
ones perchance — so trained and so accustomed have we been to hatred, even
by those, sometimes, whose mission it was to teach us to love one another. But
it is evident that this great law of brotherhood must be accomplished some day,
and I am convinced that the time is commencing when our desire for its
accomplishment will become irresistible."
I believe that this thought, however strange the expression
*' seized with a frenzy of love " may seem, is perfectly true, and is
felt more or less dimly by all men of our day. A time must come
when love, which forms the fundamental essence of the soul; will
TliE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION. 47
take the place natural to it in the life of mankind, and will become
the chief basis of the relations between man and man.
That time is coming ; it is at hand.
** We are living in the times predicted by Christ, wrote Lamennais.
" From one end of the earth to the other, everything is tottering. In all
institutions, whatever they may be, in all the different systems on which the
social life of men is founded, nothing stands firm. Everyone feels that soon
it must all fall to ruins, and that in this temple too, not one stone will be left on
another. But as the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple, from whence the
living God had departed, foreboded and prepared the erection of a new city,
and a new temple, whitlier the people of all races and of all nations would
come together at their own free will — so on the ruins of the temples and towns
of to-day, a new city and a new temple will be erected, predestined to become
the universal temple and the common fatherland of the human race, disunited
till now by teachings hostile to one another, that make brothers into strangers
and sow godless hatred and revolting warfare among them. When that hour,
known to God alone, arrives — the hour of union of the nations into one temple
and one city — then indeed will the Kingdom of Christ come — the complete
fulfilment of his divine mission. Did he not come with the one object of
teaching men that they must be united by the law of love ? "
Channing said the same j
" Mighty powers are at work in the world. Who can stay them ? God's
word has gone forth, and ' it cannot return to him void. ' A new comprehension
of the Christian spirit — a new reverence for humanity, a new feeling of
brotherhood, and of all men's relation to the common Father — this is among
the signs of our times. We see it ; do we not feel it ? Before this, all
oppressions are to fall. Society, silently pervaded by this, is to change its
aspect of universal warfare for peace. The power of selfishness, all-grasping
and seemingly invincible, is to yield to this diviner energy. , , 'On earth
peace,' will not always sound as fiction.''
XVI.
Why should we suppose that people, who are entirely in the
power of God, will always remain under the strange delusion that
only human laws — changeable, accidental, unjust and local as they
are —are important and binding, and not theone, eternal, just law of
God, common to all men ? Why should we think that the teachers
of mankind will always preach, as they now do, that there is and
can be, no such law, but that the only laws that exist are special
48 THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
laws of religious ritual for every nation and every sect ; or the so-«
called scientific laws of matter and the imaginary laws of sociology
(which do not bind men to anything) or, finally, civil laws, which
men themselves can institute and change? Such an error is
possible for a time, but why should vve suppose that people to
whom one and the same divine law written in their hearts has been
revealed in the teaching of the BrahminSj Buddha, Lao-Tszc,
Confucius and Christ, will not at last follow this one basis of all
laws, affording as it does moral satisfaction and a joyful social life
— but that they will always follow that wicked and pitiful tangle of
Church, scientific, and Governmental teaching, which diverts their
attention from the one thing needful, and directs it towards what
can be of no use to them, as it does not show them how each
separate man should live ?
Why should we think that men will continue unceasingly and
deliberately to torment themselves, some trying to rule over others,
others with hatred and envy submitting to the rulers and seeking
means themselves to become rulers ? Why should we think that
the progress men pride themselves on will always lie in the increase
of population and the preservation of life, and never in the moral
elevation of life? Will lie in miserable mechanical inventions by
which men will produce ever more and more harmful, injurious
and demoralising objects, and not lie in greater and greater unity
one with another, and in that subjugation of their lusts which i^
necessary to make such unity possible ? Why should we not
suppose that men will rejoice and vie with one another, not in
riches and luxuries, but in simplicity and frugality and in kindness
one towards another ? Why should we not suppose that men will
see progress, not in seizing more and more for themselves, but in
taking less and less from others, and in giving more and more t-o
others ; not in increasing their power, not in fighting more and
more successfully, but in growing more and more humble, and in
coming into closer and closer union, man with man and nation with
nation ?
Instead of imagining men unrestrainedly yielding to theij'
THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION. 49
lusts, breeding like rabbits, and establishing factories in towns
for the production of chemical foods to feed their increasing
generation, and living in these towns without plants or animals —
why should we not imagine chaste people, struggling against
their lusts, living in loving communion with their neighbours
amid fruitful fields, gardens and woods, with tame, well-fed animal
friends ; only with this difference from their present condition,
that they do not consider the land to be anyone's private property,
do not themselves belong to any particular nation, do not pay
taxes or duties, prepare for war, or fight anybody ; but on the
contrary, have more and more of peaceful intercourse with every
race?
To imagine the life of men like that, nothing need be invented
or altered or added in one's imagination to the lives of the
agricultural races we know in China, Russia, India, Canada,
Algeria, Egypt and Australia.
To picture such life to ourselves, one need not imagine any
kind of cunning or out-of-the-way arrangement, but need only
imagine to oneself men acknowleding no other supreme law but
the universal law expressed alike in the Brahmin, Buddhist'
Confucian, Taoist and Christian religions — -the lav/ of love to
God and to one's neighbour.
To imagine such a life we need not imagine men as some
new kind of being — -virtuous angels. They will be just as they
now are, with all weaknesses and passions natural to them ; they
will sin, will perhaps quarrel, and commit adultery, and take
away other people's property, and even slay ; but all this will be
the exception and not, as now, the rule. Their life will be
quite different owing to the one fact that they will not consider
organised violence a good thing and a necessary condition of
life, and will not be trained amiss by hearing the evil deeds of
Governments represented as good actions.
Their life will be quite different, because there will no longer
be that impediment to preaching and teaching the spirit of
goodness, love, and submission to the will of God, that exists as
50 THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
long as we admit as necessary and lawful, governmental violence
demanding what is contrary to God's law, and involving the
acceptance of what is criminal and bad, in place of what is lawful
and good.
Why should we not imagine that, through suffering, men may
be aroused from the suggestion, the hypnotism, under which they
have suffered so long, and remember that they are all sons
and servants of God, and therefore can and must submit only to
Him and to their own consciences ? All this is not difficult to
imagine; it is even difficult to imagine that it should not be
accomplished.
XVIL
" Except ye become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter
the kingdom of heaven," does not refer to individuals only, but
also to human societies. As a man, having experienced all the
miseries caused by the passions and temptations of life, consciously
returns to a state of simplicity, kindness towards all, and readiness
to accept what is good (the state in which children unconsciously
live) and returns to it with the wealth of experience and the
reason of a grown-up man, so human society also, having
experienced all the miserable consequences of abandoning the law
of God to obey human power, and of attempting to arrange life
apart from agricultural labour, must now consciously return, with
all the wealth of experience gained during the time of its
aberration, from the snares of human power, and from the attempt
to organise life on a basis of Industrial activity, and must submit to
the highest, Divine law, and to the primary work of cultivating
the soil, which it had temporarily abandoned.
Consciously to return from the snares of human power, and to
obey the supreme law of God alone, is to admit as always and
everywhere binding upon us, the eternal law of God, which is alike
in all the teachings : Brahminist, Buddhist, Confucian, Taoian
THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION. 51
Christian, and to some extent in Mahommedan (Babiist) and is
incompatible with subjection to human power.
Consciously to live an agricultural life, is to acknowledge it to
be not an accidental and temporary condition, but the life which
makes it easiest for man to fulfil the will of God, and which should
therefore be preferred to any other.
For such a return to an agricultural life and to conscious dis-
obedience to power, the Eastern nations (and among them the
Russian nation) are most favourably situated.
The Western nations have already wandered so far on the false
path of changing the organization of power, and exchanging
agricultural for industrial work, that such a return is difficult and
requires great efforts. But, sooner or later, the ever-increasing
annoyance and instability of their position will force them to return
to a reasonable and truly free life, supported by their own labour
and not by the exploitation of other nations. However alluring the
external success of manufacturing industry and the showy side of
such a life may be, the most penetrating thinkers among the
Western nations have long pointed out how disastrous is the path
they are following, and how necessary it is to reconsider and
change their way, and to return to that agricultural life which was
the original form of life for all nations, and which is the ordained
path making it possible for all men to live a reasonable and joyful
life.
The majority of the Eastern peoples, including the Russian
nation, will not have to alter their lives at ail. They need only
stop their advance along the false path they have just entered, and
become clearly conscious of the negative attitude towards power
and the affectionate attitude towards husbandry which was always
natural to them.
We of the Eastern nations should be thankful to fate for
placing us in a position in which we can benefit by the example of
the Western nations : benefit by it, not in the sense of imitating it,
but in the sense of avoiding their mistakes, not doing what they
52 THE MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
have done, not travelling the disastrous path from which nations
that have gone so far are already returning, or are preparing to
return.
Just in this halt in the march along a false path, and in
showing the possibility and inevitableness of indicating and making
a different path, one easier, more joyful, and more natural than
the one the Western nations have travelled, lies the chief and
mighty meaning of the Revolution now taking place in Russia.
What's to be Done?
About a month ago two young men came to see me. One had
on a cap and peasant bark-shoes ; the other wore a black hat that
had once been fashionable, and torn boots.
I asked them who they were. With unconcealed pride they
informed me that they were workmen, expelled from Moscow where
they had taken part in the armed rising. Passing our village, they
had found occupation as watchmen in a garden, but had lived there
less than a month. The day before they came to me, the owner of
the garden had dismissed them, charging them with persuading the
peasants to attack the garden and lay it waste. They denied the
charge with a smile, saying they had persuaded no one, they only
went into the village of an evening and chatted with their fellows.
They both, particularly the bolder, smiling one, who had
sparkling black eyes and white teeth, had read revolutionary
literature ; and they both used foreign words, in and out of place^
such as "orator,"* " proletariat," " Social-Democrat," " exploitation,"
etc.
I asked them what they had read. The darker one replied
with a smile, that he had read various pamphlets.
I asked, "Which?"
" All sorts : * Land and Liberty,' for instance."
I then asked them what they thought of such pamphletSj
''They tell the real truth," replied the dark one*
" What is it that is so true in them ? " I asked.
"Why, that it has become impossible to go on living so.'*
"Why is it impossible .?"
* An " orator " in Russia to-day is a man who goes en the stump for one of
the political parties. {Trans.)
54 WHAT'S TO BE DONE?
" Why ? We have neither land nor work, and the Government
throttles the people, without sense or reason,"
And, interrupting one another, they began to tell how the
Cossacks flogged the people with their heavy whips ; how the police
seized people haphazard, and shot people in their own houses, who
had done nothing wrong.
On my arguing that an armed rebellion was a bad and irrational
affair, the dark one smiled and quietly replied : " We are of a
different opinion."
When I spoke of the sin of murder, and about the law of God,
they exchanged glances, and the darker one shrugged his shoulders.
" Does the law of God say they are to be allowed to exploit the
proletariat?" replied he. "That used to be so, but now people
understand better, and it can't go on . . . "
I brought them out some booklets, chiefly on religious subjects.
They glanced at the titles and were evidently not pleased.
" Perhaps you don't care for them ; if so, don't take them."
''No ! why not?" said the darker one, and, putting them into
the breasts of their blouses, they took their leave.
Though I have not been reading the papers, yet from the talk
of my family, from letters I receive, and from accounts given by
visitors, I knew what had been going on in Russia recently ; and
just because I do not read the papers, I knew particularly well of
the amazing change that has latterly taken place in the views held
by our society and by the people, a change which amounts to this,
that whereas formerly people considered the Government to be
necessary, now all, except a very few, consider the activity of the
Government to be criminal and wrong, and put the blame for all
the disturbances on the Government alone. That is the opinion
of professors, postal ofiicials, authors, shopkeepers, doctors and
workmen alike. This feeling was strengthened by the dissolution
of the first Duma, and has reached its highest point as a result of
the cruel measures the Government has lately adopted.
I knew this. But my talk with these two men had a great
effect on me. Like the shock which suddenly turns freezing liquid
WHAT'S TO BE DONE? 55
into ice, it suddenly turned a whole series of similar impressions I
had received before, into a definite and indubitable conviction.
After my talk with them, I saw clearly that all the crimes the
Government is now committing in order to crush the Revolution,
not only fail to crush it, but inflame it the more ; and that if
the Revolutionary movement appears for a time to die down
under the cruelties of the Government, it will not be destroyed, but
will merely be temporarily hidden, and will inevitably spring up
again with new and increased strength. The fire is now in
such a state that any contact with it can but increase its fierceness.
It became clear to me that the only thing that could help would be,
the cessation by the Government of all and every attempt to
enforce its will ; the cessation not only of executions and arrests,
but of all banishing, persecuting and proscribing. Only in that
way can this horrible strife between brutalised people be brought
to an end.
It became perfectly clear to me that the only means of stopping
the horrors that are being committed, and the perversion of the
people, is the resignation by Government of its power. I was
convinced that that was the best thing the Government can now
do ; but I was equally firmly convinced that any such proposal,
were I to make it, would be received merely as an indication that
I was quite insane. And therefore, though it was perfectly clear
to me that the continuance of governmental cruelty can only
make things worse and not better, I did not attempt to write, or
even to speak, about it.
Nearly a month has passed, and unfortunately my supposition
finds more and more confirmation. There are more and more
executions, and more and more murders and robberies. I knew
this both from conversation and from chance glances at the papers;
and I knew that the mood of the people and of society had become
more and more embittered against the Government.
And a couple of days ago the following happened :
When I was out riding, a young man in a pea-jacket and
wearing a curious blue cap with a straight crown, who was driving
56 WHAT'S TO BE DONE?
in a peasant cart in the same direction as I, jumped off his cart
and came up to me.
He was a short man, with smaU, red moustaches, an unhealthy
complexion, and a clever, harsh face with a dissatisfied
expression.
He asked me for booklets, and did this evidently as an excuse
for entering into conversation.
I asked him where he came from.
He was a peasant from a distant village, from which the wives
of some men who have been imprisoned lately, had been to see me.
It is a village I know well, and in which it fell to my lot to
administer the Charter of Liberation"^ ; and I always admired the
particularly handsome and bold type of peasants who live there.
From that village specially talented pupils used to come to my
school.
I asked him about the peasants who had been sent to prison.
With the same assurance and absence of doubt that I had recently
met with in everyone — the same full confidence that the
Government alone is to blame — he told me that though they had
done no wrong, they had been seized, beaten and imprisoned.
Only with great difficulty could I get him to explain what they
were accused of
It turned out that they were " orators," and held meetings at
which the necessity of expropriating the land was spoken of
I said that the establishment of the equal right of all to the use
of the land cannot be established by violence.
He did not agree.
" Why not ? " said he ; " we only need to organize."
*' How will you organize ? " asked I.
" That will be seen, when the time comes."
" Do you mean, another armed rising ? "
" It has become a painful necessity .*|
* The only official position Tolstoy ever held, after he left the army, was
that of *' Arbiter of the Peace " in 1861-2. In that capacity it fell to his lot to
regulate the relations between the landlords and the newly-emancipated serfs
m his district. {Trans.)
WHAT'S TO BE DONE? 57
I said (what I always say in such cases) that evil cannot be
conquered by evil, but only by not doing evil.
" But it has become impossible to live so. We have no work
and no land. What's to become of us ? " said he, looking at me
from under his brows.
" I am old enough to be your grandfather," said I, " and I
won't argue with you ; but I will say one thing to you as to a
young man beginning life. If what the Government is doing is
bad, what you are doing, or are preparing to do, is equally bad.
You, as a young man forming your habits, should do one thing :
you should live rightly, not sinning or resisting the will of God."
He shook his head, dissatisfied, and said,
" Every man has his own God. Millions of men — millions of
Gods."
" All the same," said I, " I advise you to cease taking part in
the Revolution."
"What's to be done?" replied he. "One can't go on enduring
and enduring. What's to be done ? "
I felt that no good would come of our talk and wished to
ride away, but he stopped me.
" Won't you help me to subscribe for a newspaper ? " said he.
I refused and rode away from him, feeling sad.
He was not one of those factory unemployed of whom
thousands are now roaming Russia ; but he was a peasant
agriculturist living in the village, and there are not hundreds nor
thousands but millions of such peasants ; and the infection of
such a mood as his is spreading more and more.
On returning home, I found my family in the saddest frame of
mind. They had just read the newspaper that had come (it was
the 6th October, old style).
" Twenty-two more executions to-day! It is horrible," said my
daughter.
" Not only horrible, but senseless," said I.
" But whafs to be done f They cannot be allowed to rob and
Jcill, and go unpunished," said one of those present.
58 WHAT'S TO BE DONE?
The words : Whafs to be done ? were the very words those two
vagabonds from the garden, and to-day's peasant revolutionary,
had used.
"It is impossible to endure these insensate horrors committed
by a corrupt Government which is ruining both the country and
the people. We hate the means we have to employ, but Whafs
to be done f " say the Revolutionists on the one side.
"One cannot allow some self-selected pretenders to seize
power and rule Russia as they like, perverting and ruining
it. Of course the temporary measures now employed are
lamentable, but Whafs to be donef" say the others, the
Conservatives.
And I thought of people near to me — Revolutionists and
Conservatives, and of to-day's peasant, and of those unfortunate,
Revolutionists who import and prepare bombs, and who murder
and rob, and of the equally pitiable, lost men, who decree and
organise the Courts-martial, take part in them and shoot and hang,
assuring themselves (all of them alike) that they are doing what
is necessary, and, all alike, repeating the same words : Whafs to be
done ?
Whafs to be done ? say both these and those, but they do not
put it as a question : " What ought I to do ? " They put it
forward as an assertion that it will be much worse for everyone
if we cease to do what we are doing.
And everyone is so accustomed to these words, which hide an
explanation and a justification of the most horrible and immoral
actions, that it enters no one's head to ask : " Who are you, who
ask, Whafs to be done f Who are you, that you consider your-
selves called on to decide other people's fate by actions
which all men (even you yourselves) know to be odious and
wicked "i How do you know that what you wish to alter, should
be altered in the way that seems good to you } Do you not know
that there are many men such as you, who consider bad and
harmful what you consider good and useful ? And how do you
know that what you are doing will produce the results you expect,
WHAT'S TO BE DONE? 59
especially as you cannot but be aware that (particularly in affairs
relating to the life of a whole nation) the results attained are
generally contrary to those aimed at ? And above all, what right
have you to do what is contrary to the law of God (if you
acknowledge a God), or to the most generally accepted laws of
morality (if you acknowledge nothing but the generally accepted
laws of morality) : by what right do you consider yourselves freed
from those most simple, indubitable, human obligations, which are
irreconcilable with your Revolutionary (or with your Govern-
mental) acts ? "
If your question j Whafs to be done ? is really a question, and
not a justification ; and if you put it — as you should do — to
yourselves, a quite clear and simple answer naturally suggests
itself The answer is that you must do, not what the Tsar,
Governor, police-officers, Duma, or some political party demands of
you, but what is natural to you as a man, what is demanded of you
by that Power which sent you into the world — the Power most
people are accustomed to call God.
And as soon as one gives this reply to the question, Wkafs to
be done? that stupid, crime-begetting fog is at once dispelled,
under whose influence, for some reason, men imagine that they
alone, of all men — they (perhaps the most entangled and the most
astray from the true path of life) are called on to decide the fate of
millions, and for the questionable benefit of these millions to
commit deeds which, not questionably but evidently, produce
disasters to these millions.
There exists a general law, acknowledged by all reasonable
men, confirmed by tradition, by all the religions of all the nations,
and by true science. This law is that men, to fulfil their destiny
and attain their greatest welfare, should help one another, love one
another, and in any case should not attack one another's liberty
and life. Yet, strange to say, people appear who assure us that it
is quite needless to obey this law, and that there are cases in which
one may and should act contrary to it ; and that such deviations
from the eternal law will bring more welfare, both to individuals
6o WHAT'S TO BE DONE?
and to societies, than the fulfilment of the reasonable, supreme law
common to all humanity.
The workmen in a vast, complex factory have received from the
master clear instructions, accepted by them themselves, as to what
they should and should not do, both that the works may go well,
and for their own welfare. But people turn up who have no idea
of what the works produce or of how it is produced, and they
assure the workmen that they should cease to do what the master
has ordered, and should do just the contrary, in order that the
works may go properly and the workers obtain the greatest
benefit.
Is that not just what these people are doing — ^^unable as they
are to grasp all the consequences flowing from the general activity
of humanity ? They not only do not obey those eternal laws
(common to all mankind and confirmed by the human intellect)
framed for the success of that complex human activity, as well as
for the benefit of its individual members, but they break them,
directly and consciously, for the sake of some small, one-sided,
casual aims set up by some of themselves (generally the most
erring) under the impression (forgetting that others imagine quite
the contrary) that they will thereby attain results more beneficial
than those attained by fulfilling the eternal law common to all
men and consonant with the nature of man.
I know that to men suffering from that spiritual disease :
political obsession, a plain and clear answer to the question,
Whafs to be dojie ? an answer telling them to obey the highest law
common to all mankind, the law of love to one's neighbour, will
appear abstract and unpractical ; an answer which would seem to
them practical, would be one telling them that men, who cannot
know the consequences of their actions, and cannot know whether
they will be alive an hour hence, but who do know very well that
every murder and act of violence is bad, should nevertheless —
under the fanciful pretext that they are establishing other people's
future welfare — unceasingly act as if they knew quite surely what
consequences their actions will produce, and as if they did not know
WHATS TO BE DONE? 6i
that to kill and torment people is bad, but only knew that such
or such a monarchy or constitution is desirable.
That will be the case with many who are suffering from the
spiritual disease of political obsession, but I think the great majority
of people suffering from all the horrors and crimes done by men who
are so diseased, will at last understand the terrible deception under
which those lie who acknowledge coercive power used by man
to man as rightful and beneficent ; and having ^understood this,
they will free themselves for ever from the madness and wickedness
of either participating in force-using power, or submitting to it ;
and will understand that each man should do one thing, namely -.
should fulfil what is demanded of him by the reasonable and
beneficent Source, which men call " God," of whose demands no
man possessed of reason can fail to be conscious.
I cannot but think that if all men, forgetting their various
positions as ministers, policemen, presidents and members of
various combative or non-combative parties, would only do the
deeds natural to each of them as a human being — not only
would those horrors and sufferings cease, of which the life of man
(especially the life of Russian people) is now full, but the Kingdom
of God would have come upon earth.
If only some people acted so, the more of them there were, the
less evil would there be, and the more good order and general
welfare.
An Appeal to Russians:
TO THE GOVERNMENT, THE REVOLUTIONISTS,
AND THE PEOPLE.
I.
TO THE GOVERNMENT.
[By Government I mean those tvho, availing themselves of
established authority^ can change the existing laws and put them in
operation. In Russia, these people zvere and still are: the Tsar, his
Ministers, and his nearest advisers.']
The acknowledged basis of all Governmental power is solely
the promotion of the welfare of the people over whom the power
IS exerted.
But what are you who nov/ govern Russia, doing ? You are
fighting the Revolutionists with shifts and cunning such as they
employ against you ; and, worst of all, with cruelty even greater
than theirs. But of two contending parties the conqueror always
is not the more shifty, cunning, cruel, or harsh of the two, but the
one that is nearest to the aim towards which humanity is
advancing.
Whether the Revolutionists rightly or wrongly define the aim
towards which they strive, they certainly aim at some new
arrangement of life ; while your only desire is to maintain
yourselves in the profitable position in which you are established.
Therefore, you Avill be unable to resist the Revolution, with your
banner of Autocracy, even though it be with constitutional
amendments, with perverted Christianity called Orthodoxy, a
renovated Patriarchate, and all sorts of mystical interpretations.
AN APPEAL TO RUSSIANS. 63
All that Is moribund, and cannot be restored. Your salvation lies
not in Dumas, elected in this way or in that ; still less in rifle-shots,
cannons and executions ; but it lies in confessing your sin against
the people, and trying to redeem it and efface it while you yet
have time to do so. Set before the people ideals of equity, goodness
and truth, more lofty and more just than those your opponents
advocate. Place such an ideal before the people, not to save
yourselves, but seriously and honestly setting yourselves to
accomplish it, and you will not only save yourselves, but will save
Russia from those ills which already afflict or are now threatening
her.
Nor need you invent this ideal ; it is the old, old ideal of all the
Russian folk: the ideal of the restoration to the whole people —
not to the peasants only, but to the whole people — of their natural
and just right to the land.
To men unaccustomed to think with their own minds, this idea
seems unrealisable, because it is not a repetition of v/hat has been
done in Europe and Am.erica. But just because this ideal has
nowhere yet been accomplished, it is the true ideal of our day :
and, more, it is the nearest ideal, and one which, before it is;
accomplished in other countries, should now be accomplished in
Russia. Wipe out 'your sins by a good deed ; while you still have
the power, strive to destroy the ancient, crying, cruel injustice of
private property in land, which is so vividly felt by the whole
agricultural population, and from which they suffer so grievously ;
and you will have the support of all the best people — the so-called
'* intellectuals." You will have with you all true Constitutionalists;
who cannot but . see that, before calling on the people to choose
representatives, the people must be freed from the land-slavery in
which it now lives. The Socialists, too, will have to admit that
they are v/ith you, for the ideal which they set before themselves :
the nationalisation of the implements of labour — is attainable first
of all by the nationalisation of the chief implement of labour — -
the land. The Revolutionists, too, will be on your side, for the
revolution which you will be accomplishing by freeing the land
64 AN APPEAL TO RUSSIANS.
from private ownership, is one of the chief points in their
programme. On your side, above all, will be the whole hundred-
million agricultural peasantry, which alone represents the real
Russian people. Only do what you, occupying the place of
Government, are bound to do, and, while there is yet time, make it
your business to establish the real welfare of the people ; and in
place of the feeling of fear and anger which you now encounter,
you will experience the joy of close union with the hundred-million
Russian people ; you will know the love and gratitude of this
kindly folk, who will not remember your sins, but will love you for
the good you do them, as they now love him, or those, who freed
them from slavery.
Remember that you are not tsars, ministers, senators, and
governors, but men ; and having done this, in place of grief,
despair and terror, you will find the joy of forgiveness and of love.
But that this may happen, you must not undertake this work
superficially, as a means of safety, but sincerely, seriously, and with
your soul's whole strength. Then you will see what eager,
reasonable, and harmonious activity will be displayed in the best
spheres of society, bringing the best men of all classes to the front,
and depriving of all importance those who now disturb Russia.
Do this, and all those terrible, brutal elements of revenge, anger,
avarice, vanity, ambition, and above all of ignorance, will
disappear, which now come to the front, infecting, agitating, and
tormenting Russia — and of which you are guilty.
Yes, only two courses are now open to you, men of the
Government : a fratricidal slaughter, and all the horrors of a
revolution leading to your inevitable and disgraceful destruction ;
or the peaceful fulfilment of the ancient and just demands of the
whole people, showing other Christian nations both that the
injustice from which men have suffered so long and so cruelly can
be abolished, and how to abolish it.
Whether the form of social organisation under which you hold
power has or has not outlived its day, so long as you still hold
power, use it not to multiply the evil you have already done, and
AN APPEAL TO RUSSIANS. 65
the hatred you have already provoked ; but use it to accomplish a
great and good deed not for your nation alone, but for all
mankind. If this social organisation has outlived its day, let the
last act done under it be one not of falsehood and cruelty, but of
goodness and truth.*
* Regarding the remark in the appeal to the Government referring to
salvation *' not lying in Dumas elected in this way or that '' we will allow
ourselves to make a slight reservation taking into consideration the fact that
separate statements by Tolstoy are so often interpreted in a perverse sense.
By these words he does not at all desire to advise the Government not to
concede to the demands of public opinion. On the contrary, at the very time
when this appeal was being prepared tor publication we received from Tolstoy
a letter in which he expresses himself thus :
". . . The general irritation cannot be overcome by force, but the
Government, i.e., those people who constitute the Government, are bound before
God, before men, and before themselves, to cease all acts of violence — to do all
that which is demanded of them, to relieve themselves of their responsibility ;
to grant legislative assembly and a ballot, universal, equal, direct, and secret,
and an amnesty to all political offenders, and everything ..."
Hence in the passage referred to in his appeal to the Government Tolstoy
only wishes to convey that the gist of the matter lies not in the Duma but in a
more radical alleviation of the position of the people. — Editor,
TO THE REVOLUTIONISTS.
[By Revoluticnists I mean those people — beginning with the most
peaceful Constitutionalists and extending to the most militant Revolu-
tionists— ivho zuish to replace the present Governmental authority by
another authority ^ otherwise organised and consisting of other people^
You, Revolutionists of all shades and denominations, consider the
present Government harmful^ and in various ways : by organising
assemblies (allowed or prohibited by Government), by formulating
projects, printing articles, making speeches, by unions, strikes and
66 AN APPEAL TO RUSSIANS.
demonstrations, and, finally (as a natural and inevitable basis and
consequence of all these activities) by murders, executions and
armed insurrections — you strive to replace the existing authority by
another, a new one.
Though you are all at variance among yourselves as to what
this new authority should be, yet to bring about the arrangements
proposed by each of your groups, you stop short at no crimes:
murders, explosions, executions, or civil war.
You have no words strong enough to express your condemnation
and contempt for those official personages who struggle against
you ; but it should not be forgotten that all the cruel acts committed
by members of the Government in their struggle with you, are justi-
fied in their eyes, because they, from the Tsar to the lowest
policeman, having been educated in unlimited respect for the
established order hallowed by age and tradition, when defending
this order, feel fully convinced that they are doing what is demanded
of them by millions of people, who acknowledge the rightfulness of
the existing order and of their position in it. So that the moral
responsibility for their cruel actions rests not on them alone, but is
shared by many people. You, on the other hand : people of all
sorts of professions — doctors, teachers, engineers, students, pro-
essors, journalists, women-students, railway-men, labourers, lawyers,
merchants, land-owners, occupied till now with special pursuits
which have nothing to do with Government — you, who are not
appealed to or recognised by anyone but yourselves, having suddenly
become indubitably aware of the precise organisation needed by
Russia, in the name of this organisation (which is to be realised in
the future, and which each of you defines in his own way) take
upon yourselves the whole responsibility for these very terrible
acts you commit; and you throw bombs, destroy, murder and
execute.
Thousands have been killed ; all Russians have been reduced
to despair, embittered and brutalised. And what is it all for?
It is all because among a small group of people, hardly one ten*
thousandth of the whole nation, some have decided that what is
AN APPEAL TO RUSSIANS. 67
needed for the very best organisation of the Russian Empire is
the continuation of the Duma which lately sat ; while others say
that what is needed is a Duma chosen by universal, secret, and
equal voting ; a third party say that what is needed is a Republic :
and yet a fourth party declare that what is needed is not an
ordinary Republic, but a Socialist Republic. And for the sake of
this, you provoke a civil war !
You say you do it for the people's sake, and that your chief
aim is the welfare of the people. But the hundred-millions for
whom you do it, do not ask it of you, and do not want all these
things which you, by such evil means, try to obtain. The mass of
the people do not need you at all, but always has regarded and
still regards you, and cannot but regard you, as useless grubs who,
in one way or another, consume the fruits of its labour and are a
burden upon it. Only realise to yourselves clearly the life of this
hundred-million Russian agricultural peasantry, who strictly
speaking alone constitute the body of the Russian nation ; and
understand that you all — professors and factory hands, doctor*
engineers, journalists, students, land-owners, women-students
veterinary surgeons, merchants, lawyers and railway-men : the very
people so concerned about its welfare — are all harmful parasites
on that body, sucking its sap, rotting upon it, and communicating
to it your own corruption.
Only imagine vividly to yourselves these millions, ever patiently
labouring, and supporting your unnatural and artificial lives on their
shoulders ; imagine them possessed of all these reforms you are
hoping to obtain, and you will see how foreign to this people is all
that professedly for their advantage, you are aiming at. They
have other tasks, and see more profoundly that you do the aim
that is before them ; and they express this consciousness of their
destiny, not in newspaper articles, but by the whole life of a
hundred-million people.
But no, you cannot understand this. You are firmly convinced
that this coarse folk has no roots of its own, and that it will be a
great blessing for it, if you enlighten it with the latest article you
6S AN APPEAL TO RUSSIANS.
have read, and by so doing make it as pitiful, helpless, and
perverted as yourselves.
You say you want a just organisation of life, but in fact you
can exist only under an irregular, unjust organisation. Should
a really just organisation be established, with no place for those
who live on the labour of others, you all : landlords, merchants,
doctors, professors, and lawyers, as well as factory-hands,
manufacturers, workshop-owners, engineers, teachers and producers
of cannons, tobacco, spirits, looking-glasses, velvet, etc., together
with the members of the Government — would starve to death.
Whdit fou need is not a really just order of life: for nothing
would be more dangerous for you than an order in which everyone
had to do work useful to all.
Only cease to deceive yourselves : consider well the place you
hold among the Russian people and what you are doing, and it will
be clear to you that your struggle with the Government is the struggle
of two parasites on a healthy body, and that both contending
parties are equally harmful to the people. Speak, therefore, of
your own interests ; but do not speak for the people. Do not lie
about them, but leave them in peace. Fight the Government, if
you cannot refrain ; but know that you are fighting for yourselves
not for the people, and that in this violent struggle there is not only
nothing noble or good, but that your struggle is a very stupid and
harmful and, above all, a very immoral affair.
Your activity aims, you say, at making the general condition
of the people better. But that the people's condition should be
better, it is necessary for people themselves to be better. This is
as much a truism, as that to heat a vessel of water, all the drops
in it must be heated. That people may become better, it is
necessary that they should turn their attention ever more and more
to their inner life. But external public activity, and especially
public strife, always diverts men's minds from the inner life ; and,
therefore, by perverting people, always and inevitably lowers the level
of general morality, as has everywhere been the case, and as we
now see most strikingly exemplified in Russia. This lowering of
AN APPEAL TO RUSSIANS. 69
the level of general morality causes the most immoral part of
society to come more and more to the top ; and an immoral public
opinion is formed which not only permits, but even approves
crimes, robberies, debauchery, and murder itself. Thus a vicious
circle is set up : the evil elements of society, evoked by the social
struggle, throw themselves hotly into public activity corresponding
to the low level of their morality, and this activity again attracts
to itself yet worse elements of society. Morality is lowered more
and more, and the most immoral of men : the Dantons, Marats>
Napoleons, Talleyrands, Bismarcks, become the heroes of the day.
So that participation in public activity and strife, is not only not an
elevated, useful and good thing (as it is customarily supposed and
said to be by those who are engaged in this struggle) but on the
contrary it is a most unquestionably stupid, harmful and immoral
affair.
Reflect on this, especially you, young people, who are not yet
immersed in the sticky mud of political activity. Shake off from
ourself the terrible hypnotism you are under ; free yourselves
from the lie of this pseudo-service of the people, in the name of
which you consider that everything is permitted you ; above all, think
of the highest qualities of your soul, demanding of you neither
equal and secret voting, nor armed insurrections, nor legislative
assemblies, nor any similar stupidities and cruelties, but solely that
you should live good and true lives.
What is necessary for your good and sincere life is, first of all,
not to deceive yourselves by supposing that by yielding to your
petty passions : vanity, ambition, envy and bravado, or desiring to
find an outlet for your spare energy, or to improve your own
position, you can serve the people. No ; what is necessary is to
examine yourselves, and to endeavour to correct your own failings
and become better men. If you wish to think of public life, think
first of your sins against the people ; try to consume as little of their
labour as possible, and if you cannot help the peasantry, try at least
not to mislead and confuse them, committing the terrible crime
many of you now commit by deceiving and provoking them,
70 AN APPEAL TO RUSSIANS.
inciting them to robberies and insurrections, which always end in
suffering and the yet greater enslavement for the people.
The intricate and difficult circumstances amid which we live in
Russia demand of you, especially at the present time, not
newspaper articles, nor speeches in assemblies, nor promenadings
in the streets with revolvers, nor the (often dishonest) incitement
of the peasants while you evade responsibility yourselves ; but a
frank and strict relation to yourselves and to your own lives, which
alone are in your power, and the improvement of which is the sole
means by which you can improve the general condition of the
people.
III.
TO THE PEOPLE.
[Bj/ tJie people I 7nean the ivhole Rtissian people^ hit especially
the working, agricultural people^ wJio by their labour support the lives
of all the rest.]
You, Russian working people, chiefly agricultural peasants,
now find yourselves in Russia in a specially difficult position.
However hard it was for you to live vath little land and large taxes
and customs-duties and wars, which the Government devised, you
lived, till quite recently, believing in the Tsar, and believing that
it was impossible to live without a Tsar and without his authority ;
and you humbly submitted to the Government.
Howev^er badly the Tsar's Government ruled you, you humbly
submitted to it as long as there was only one Government. But
now, when it has come about that a part of the people has rebelled,
and ceasing to obey the Tsar's Government, has begun to fight
against it : when in many places instead of one Government there
are two, each of them demanding obedience, you can no longer
humbly submit to the powers that be, without considering whether
the. Government rules you well or ill ; but have to choose
which of the two you will submit to. What are you to do ? Not
those tens of thousands of workmen who bustle and are hustled
AN APPEAL TO RUSSIANS. 71
about in the towns, but you, the great, real, hundred- miUion
agricultural people ?
The old Government of the Tsar says to you : " Do not listen
to the rebels ; they promise much, and will deceive you. Remain
true to me, and I will satisfy all your wants."
The rebels say : " Do not believe the Tsar's Government, which
has always tormented you, and will continue to do so. Join us
help us — and we will arrange for you a Government like that of
the freest countries. Then you will choose your own rulers, and
will govern yourselves, and right all your wrongs."
What are you to do ?
Support the old Government ? But, as you know, the old
Government has long promised to lighten your burdens, but
instead of lightening them, it has only increased your greatest
evils : lack of land, taxes and conscription.
Join the rebels ? They promise to arrange for you an elected
Government such as exists in the freest countries. But
wherever such elected Governments exist, in the countries that
have most freedom, in the French and American Republics for
instance, just as among ourselves, the chief ills of the people are
not remedied : as among us, or to an even greater degree, the land
is in the hands of the rich ; just as among us the people are laden
with taxes and customs-duties without being asked, and as among
us, armies are maintained and wars declared when those in power
desire it, without the people being consulted. Moreover, our new
Government is not yet established, and we do not know what it
will be like.
Not only is it not to your advantage to join either Government,
but you cannot do it conscientiously before God. To defend the
old Government means to do what was done recently in Odessa
Sevastopol, Kief, Riga, the Caucasus, and Moscow, i.e. to capture,
kill, hang, burn alive, execute, and shoot in the streets, killing
children and women. But to join the Revolutionists means to do
the same : to kill people, throw bombs, burn, rob, fight with
soldiers, execute and hang.
^2 AN APPEAL TO RUSSIANS.
Therefore, labouring Christian people : now that the Tsar's
Government calls on you to fight against your brothers, and the
Revolutionists call on you to do the same, you evidently, not for
your own benefit alone, but before God and your consciences, must
and should jom neither the old nor the new Governme^it, and take
no part in the imchristian doings either of the one or the other.
And not to take part in the doings of the old Government
means not to serve as soldiers, guards, constables, town or country
police ; not to serve in any Government institutions and offices,
County-Councils (Z^mstvos), Assemblies, or Dumas. Not to take
part in the doings of Revolutionists means : not to form meetings
or unions, or take part in strikes ; not to burn or wreck other
people's houses, and not to join any armed rebellion.
Two Governments hostile to one another now rule you, and
they both summon you to take part in cruel, unchristian deeds.
What can you do but reject all Government ?
People say that it is difficult and even impossible to live without
a Government, but you Russian workmen — especially agriculturists
— know that when you live a peaceful, laborious countrj'- life in the
villages, cultivating the land on terms of equality, and deciding
your public affairs in the Commune (Mir), you have no need at all
of a Government.
The Government needs you, but you — Russian agriculturists —
do not need a Government. And, therefore, in the present
difficult circumstances, when it is equally bad to join either
Government, it is reasonable and beneficial for you, agricultural
Russians, not to obey any Government.
But if this is so for the agricultural folk, what should the
factory-hands and found ry-w^orkers do, of whom there are more
in many lands than there are agriculturists, and whose lives are
quite in the power of the Government }
They should do the same as the village workers : not obey any
Government, and with all their strength try to return to agricultural
life.
Only let the town workmen, as well as the villagers cease to
AN APPEAL TO RUSSIANS. 73
obey or serve Government, and, with the abolition of its power, the
slavish conditions in which you live will vanish of themselves, for
they are maintained only by governmental violence. And the
violence the Government employs is supplied by yourselves. It is
that power alone which places customs-duties on goods imported or
exported ; it alone collects taxes on articles made in the country .
it (the power of the Government) makes the laws which maintain
the monopolies owned by private people, and the right of private
property in land ; only that power, controlling the army which you
yourselves supply, holds you in continual subjection or submission
to itself, and to its abettors — the rich.
When you, town-workers as well as villagers, cease to obey the
Government, it will no longer be necessary for you (town-workmen)
to accept whatever conditions the owners of the mills and factories
dictate to you, but you yourselves will give them your conditions,
or will start your own co-operative (artdl) manufacture of things
needed by the people ; or, having free land, you will resume a
natural agricultural life.
" But if we Russian folk begin at once to live like that, not
obeying the Government — there will be no Russia," say those to
whom it seems that the existence of Russia — that is to say, the
union of many different nations under one Government — is
something important, great, and useful.
In reality, this combination of many different nations, called
Russia, is not only not important for you, Russian working men,
but just this combination is a chief cause of your miseries.
If they oppress you with taxes and duties, as they oppressed
your forefathers, accumulationg vast debts which you have to pay ;
if they take you as soldiers and send you to different ends of the
earth to fight people with whom you have nothing to do, and who
have nothing to do with you, all this is only done to maintain
Russia, I.e. to maintain a forcible combination of Poland, the
Cauca^us, Finland, Central Asia, Manchuria, and other lands and
peoples, under one rule. But besides the fact that all your ills
come from this union called Russia, this union involves a great sin
74 AN APPEAL TO RUSSIANS.
in which you involuntarily participate when you obey Government
That there should be a Russia such as the existing one, the Polos?
Finns, Letts, Georgians, Tartars, Armenians, and others, have to be
held in subjection. And to hold them in subjection, it is necessary
to forbid them to live as they wish to, and if they disobey this
order, they have to be punished and killed. Why should you take
part in these evil deeds when you yourselves suffer from them.
Let those who have need of such a Russia, dominating Poland,
Georgia, Finland, and other lands — let them arrange it if they can.
But for you, working people, this is not at all necessary. What
you need is something quite else. You only need enough land,
and that no one should forcibly take your property, or oblige your
sons to go as soldiers, and above all that no one should compel you
to do evil deeds. And these evils will cease, if only you refuse to
obey the demands of the Government — demands which ruin and
destroy both your bodies and your souls.
" But how, without a Government, and when all live in separate
Communes, are all large public affairs to be arranged ? How will
the ways of communication, railways, telegraphs, steamers, the post,
the higher educational establishments, the libraries, and trade be
managed without a Government?"
People are so accustomed to see the Government control all
public affairs, that it seems to them that the work itself is done by
Government, and that without Government it is impossible to
organise High Schools, ways of communication, post-offices,
libraries, or commercial relations. But this is not true. The
largest public affairs, not only national but international, are
arranged by private individuals without Governmental assistance.
In this way all kinds of international, postal, learned, commercial
and industrial alliances are arranged. Governments not only do
not aid these voluntarily organised unions, but when they take part
in them they always hinder them.
" But if you do not obey the Government, and do not pay taxes
or supply soldiers, foreign nations will come and conquer you," add
those who wish to rule over you. Do not believe it. Only live
AN APPEAL TO RUSSIANS.
75
acknowledging the land to be common property; not going as
soldiers, and not paying taxes (except such as you voluntarily give
for public works) and peacefully settling your disagreements
through your village Communes — and other nations, seeing your
good life, will not come and conquer you ; or, if they come, on
getting to know your good life they will adopt it and, instead of
fighting you, will unite with you. For all the nations, like you your-
selves, have suffered and now suffer from Governments ; from the
strife fin war, trade, and industry) of different Governments against
one another, and from the strife of classes, and of different parties.
Among all Christian nations an inner labour is going on, the chief
aim of which is emancipation from Governments ; but this eman-
cipation is particularly difficult for nations in which the majority
have abandoned agricultural life, and live an industrial town life
employing the labour of other races. Among such nations
emancipation is being prepared by socialism. But for you
Russian labourers, living mainly an agricultural life, and supplying
your own needs, this emancipation is particularly easy. Govern-
ment for you has long ceased to be a necessity or even a
convenience, and has become a great and uncompensated burden
and misfortune.
The Government, only the Government, by its power deprives
you of land. Only the Government collects from you in taxes and
customs-dues a great part of what you obtain by your labour. It
alone, deprives you of the labour of your sons, taking them for
soldiers and sending them to be killed.
But Government is not some essential condition of human life,
which will exist as long as mankind lasts, like the cultivation of the
soil, marriage, the family, or human intercourse — Government
is a human institution, and like all human institutions, is set up
when it is needed and abolished when it becomes unnecessary.
Of old, human sacrifices, the worship of idols, divinations
tortures, slavery, and many other things, were instituted. But they
were all abolished when people were so far enlightened that these
institutions became superfluous burdens and evils. So also with
76 AN APPEAL TO RUSSIANS.
Governments. Governments were instituted when the nations
were savage, cruel and coarse. The Governments set up were
equally cruel and coarse. Nearly all the Governments took their
laws from the heathen Romans ; and to the present day the
Governments remain as coarse as they were in the days
before Christianity, with their forcible requisitions, soldiers'
prisons and executions- But the people, becoming enlightened,
have less and less need of such Governments, and in our day most
of the Christian nations have arrived at the stage when Govern-
ment merely hinders them.
The shell is necessary for the egg until the bird is hatched.
But when the bird is ready, the shell is but a hindrance. So it is
with Governments ; most Christian nations feel this, and particu-
larly Russian agricultural people now feel this acutely.
" Government is necessary, we cannot live without a Govern-
ment," men say, and they are especially convinced of this now,
when there are disturbances among the people. But who are
these men, so concerned for the preservation of the Government ?
They are the very men who live on the labour of the people, and,
conscious of their sin, fear its expos^ure, and hope that the
Government (being bound to them by unity of interest) will
protect their wrong-doing by force. For these men, the Govern-
ment is very necessary, but not for you — the peasantry. For you
the Government has always been simply a burden ; and now,
that it has by its evil rule provoked riots, and brought it to pass that
there are two rival Governments, it has become an evident
misfortune and a great sin, which you must repudiate for your
bodily and spiritual welfare.
Whether you, labouring Russian people, free yourselves at
once from obedience to any Government, or whether you will yet
have to suffer and endure at the hands of members of the old or of
the new Government (or possibly at the hands of foreign
Governments) you Russian labouring men have now no other
course but to cease to obey the Government, and to begin to live
without it.
AN APPEAL TO RUSSIANS. 77
You, country labourers as well as town workers, may at first
have to suffer at the hands of the old as well as of the ne\^
Governments for your disobedience, and also from disagreements
arising among yourselves ; but all the ills that may come from
these causes are as nothing compared to the ills and sufferings you
now endure and will yet have to endure from the Government, if
(obeying one or other Government) you are drawn into partici-
pation in the murders, executions, and civil strife that are now
being committed, and that will yet long continue to be committed
by the contending Governments, unless you stop them by refusing
to participate in them.
Only yield to what is demanded of you by this or that
Government : only, for the support of the old Government, enter
on a struggle with the Revolutionaries ; serving in the army, or
police, or joining the " Black-gang " mobs ; or, for the support
of the Revolutionists, take part in strikes, the destruction of
property, armed risings, or any unions, elections, or Dumas — and
besides burdening your souls with many sins, and encountering
much suffering, you will not have time to look round before one
Government or other (even though you may have promoted its
triumph) will fasten the deadly noose of slavery in which you have
lived, and are still living, once more upon you.
Only do not submit to, and do not obey, either the one or the
other, and you will rid yourselves of your miseries, and will be
free.
From the present difficult circumstances you, Russian working
people, have but one way of escape ; and that is by refusing to
obey any force-using authority — humbly and meekly enduring
violence, and refusing to participate in it
This way of escape is simple and easy, and undoubtedly leads
to welfare. But to act in this way you must submit to the govern-
ment of God and to His law. " He that endureth to the end will
be saved," and your salvation is in your own hands.
LETTER TO A CHINESE GENTLEMAN.
I.
Dear Sir,—
I received your books and have read them with great interest,
especially the " Papers from a Viceroy's Yamen."
The life of the Chinese people has always interested me in the
highest degree, and I have endeavoured to become acquainted with
what was accessible in the life of the Chinese, especially with the
Chinese wisdom, the books of Confucius, Mentze, Laotze, and
commentaries upon them. I have also read about Chinese
Buddhism and books by Europeans upon China. Latterly,
moreover since those atrocities which have been perpetrated upon
the Chinese by Europeans — amongst the others and to a great
extent by Russians — the general disposition of the Chinese people
has interested and does yet interest me.
The Chinese people, whilst suffering so much from the immoral
and coarsely egotistic avarice and cruelty of the European nations,
has, until lately, answered all the violence committed against it
with a magnanimous and wise tranquillity preferring to suffer rather
than to fight against this violence. I am speaking of the Chinese
people, but not about the Government. This tranquillity and
patience of the great and powerful Chinese people elicited only an
increasingly insolent aggression from Europeans, as is always the
case with coarsely selfish people liviiig merely an animal life as
were the Europeans who had dealings with China. The trial
which the Chinese have undergone and are now undergoing is a
great and hea\y one, but precisely now is it important that the
Chinese people should not lose patience, or alter their attitude
towards violence, so as not to deprive themselves of all the vast
LETTER TO A CHINESE GENTLEMAN. 79
results which must follow the enduring of violence without
returning evil for evil.
Only " he that endureth to the end the same shall be saved '*
is said in the Christian law, and I think that it is an indubitable
truth, although one which men find it hard to accept. Abstinence
from returning evil for evil and non-participation in evil is the
surest means not only of salvation but of victory over those who
commit evil.
The Chinese could see a striking confirmation of the truth of
this law afte(^ their surrender of Port Arthur to Russia. The
greatest efforts to defend Port Arthur by arms against the Japanese
and the Russians would not have produced such ruinous
consequences for Russia and Japan as those material and moral
evils which the surrender of Port Arthur to the former brought
on Russia and Japan. The same will inevitably be the case with
Wei-hai-Wei and Kiao-chau, surrendered by China to England and
Germany.
The success of some robbers elicits the envy of others, and
the prey seized becomes an object of dissension ruining the
robbers themselves. Such is the case with dogs, so also is it
with men who have descended to the level of animals.
IL
Therefore it is that I now with fear and grief hear and see in your
book the manifestation in China of the spirit of strife, of the desire
to forcibly resist the atrocities committed by the European nations.
Were this to be the case, were the Chinese people indeed to lose
patience and, arming themselves according ta the methods of
Europeans, to expel from their midst all the European robbers —
which task they could easily accomplish with their intelligence,
persistence, and energy, and above all by reason of their great
numbers — it would be dreadful. Dreadful not in the sense in
which this was understood by one of the coarsest and most
8o LETTER TO A CHINESE GENTLEMAN.
benighted representatives of Western Europe — the German
Emperor — not in the sense that China would become dangerous to
Europe^ but in the sense that China would cease to be the main-
stay of your true practical national wisdom consisting in living
that peaceful agricultural life which is natural to all rational men,
and to which those nations who have abandoned this life are bound
sooner or later consciously to return.
in.
I think that in our time a great revulsion is taking place in the
life of humanity, and that in this revulsion China, at the head of the
Eastern nations, must play a grand part.
Methinks the vocation of the Eastern nations, China, Persia,
Turkey, India, Russia and perhaps Japan, if she is not yet
completely enmeshed in the net of depraved European civilisation, —
consists in indicating to all nations that true way towards freedom
to which, as you say in your book, there is in the Chinese language
no other word than Tao, — the Way, — i.e., an activity in conformity
with the eternal and fundamental law of human life.
Freedom according to the teaching of Jesus is realised in this
same way. " And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall
make you free " is said in that teaching. And it is this freedom,
which Western nations have almost irrevocably lost, that the
Eastern nations are methinks called to realise.
My idea is this :
From the most ancient times it has been the case that out of
the midst of peaceful and laborious people there arose savage men
who preferred violence to labour, and these savage and idle men
attacked and compelled the peaceful ones to work for them. So it
has been both in the West and in the East amongst all nations who
lived the state life, and so it continued for ages and continues yet.
But in olden times when conquerors seized vast populated spaces
they could not do much harm to the subdued : the small number oi
rulers and great number of ruled, especially when the ways of
LETTER TO A CHINESE GENTLEMAN. 8i
communication were very primitive, merely produced the result of
bringing a small portion of the population into subjection to the
violence of the rulers, whereas the majority could live a peaceful life
without coming into direct touch with the oppressors. Thus it was
in the whole world, and so until quite latterly did it continue
amongst the Eastern nations as well, and especially in the vast land
of China.
But such a situation could not and cannot continue, for two
reasons : firstly, because coercive power through its very essence
keeps continually becoming more depraved, and secondly, because
the subjugated people, becoming more and more enlightened, see
with increasing clearness the evil of their submission to power
The effect of this is further increased by technical improvements in.
the means of communication : roads, the post, telegraph,
telephones, owing to which the rulers manifest their influence in
places where it could not otherwise have reached ; and the
oppressed also interassociating ever more closely, understand
clearer and clearer the disadvantages of their position.
And the disadvantages in course of time become so heavy that
the subdued feel impelled to alter in some way or another their
relation to authority.
The Western nations have long felt this necessity and have long
since changed their attitude to power by the one means, common
to all Western peoples — by the limitation of power through
representatives, that is as a matter of fact by the spreading of
power, by its transference from one or a few to the many.
At the present time I think that the term has arrived for the
Eastern nations also and for Chfna similarly to realise all the evil
of despotic power and to search for the means of liberation from it
the present conditions of life having become unbearable.
IV.
I know that in China there exists a teaching implying that the
chief ruler, the " Bogdikhan," should be the wisest and most
G
82 LETTER TO A CHINESE GENTLEMAN.
virtuous man, and that if he be not such, then the subjects may
and should cease to obey him. But I think that such a teaching is
merely a justification of power, and as unsound as the teaching of
Paul circulated amongst the European nations, which affirms that
the powers are of God. The Chinese people cannot know whether
their Emperor is wise and virtuous, just as the Christian nations
could not know whether our power was granted by God to this
ruler and not to that other one who fought against him.
These justifications of power could stand when the evil of
^jower was not much felt by the people ; but now that the majority
of men feel all the disadvantages and injustice of power, of the
power of one, or a few, over many, these justifications are not
effective, and nations have to alter one way or another their
attitude to authority. And the Western nations have long ago
made this alteration : it is now the turn of the East. It is I think
in such a position that Russia and Persia, Turkey and China
now find themselves. All these nations have attained the period
when they can no longer remain in their former attitude towards
their rulers. As was correctly remarked by the Russian writer
Gertzen : a Gengis Khan with telegraphs and electric motors is
impossible. If Gengis Khans or men similar to them still exist in
the East, it is clear that their hour has come and that they are the
last. They cannot continue to exist both because owing to
telegraphs and all that is called civilisation their power is
becoming too oppressive, and because the nations, owing to the same
civilisation, feel and recognise with especial keenness that the
existence or non-existence of these Gengis Khans is for them not
a matter of indifference as it used to be of old, but that almost all
the calamities from which they suffer are produced precisely by
this power to' which they submit without any advantage to them-
selves but merely by habit.
In Russia this is certainly the case ; I think that the same is
true also of Turkey and Persia and China.
For China this is especially true, owing to the peaceful dis-
position of its population and the bad organisation of its Army
LETTER TO A CHINESE GENTLEMAN. S^
which gives the Europeans the possibility of robbing with impunity
Chinese lands under the pretext of collisions and differences with
the Chinese Government.
The Chinese people cannot but feel the necessity of changing
its relation to power.
V.
And now I gather from your book and other information that
some light-minded Chinese, called the party of reform, think that
this alteration should consist in following the methods of the
Western nations, t'.e.y in substituting a representative Government
for a despotic one, in organising an army similar to that of
Western nations, and a similar organisation of industry.
This solution, which at first sight appears the simplest and
most natural, is not only a superficial one, but very silly, and,
according to all I know about China, it is altogether alien to the
wise Chinese people. To organise such a Constitution, such an
Army, perhaps, also, such a conscription, and such an industry as
the Western nations have got, would mean to renounce all that by
which the Chinese people have lived and are living, to renounce
their past, to renounce their rational, peaceful, agricultural life, that
life which constitutes the true and only way of Tao, not only for
China, but for all mankind.
Let us admit that, having introduced amongst themselves
European institutions, the Chinese were to expel the Europeans
and to have a Constitution, a powerful standing Army, and an
industrial development similar to the European.
Japan has done this, has introduced a Constitution and extended
the Army and Fleet, and developed industry, and the result of all
these inseparably interconnected measures is already obvious
The condition of its people more and more approaches the
position of the European nations, and this position is extremely
urdensome.
84 LETTER TO A CHINESE GENTLEMAN.
VL
The States of Western Europe, externally very powerful, may
now crush the Chinese army ; but the position of the people living
in these States not only cannot be compared with the position of
the Chinese, but, on the contrary, it is most calamitous. Amongst
all these nations there unceasingly proceeds a strife between the
destitute, exasperated working people and the Government and
wealthy, a strife which is restrained only by coercion on the part of
deceived men who constitute the Army ; a similar strife is
continually waging between the different States demanding
endlessly increasing armaments, a strife which is any moment
ready to plunge into the greatest catastrophes. But however
dreadful this state of things may be, it does not constitute the
essence of the calamity of the Western nations. Their chief and
fundamental calamity is that the whole life of these nations who
are unable to furnish themselves with food, is entirely based on the
necessity of procuring means of sustenance by violence and cunning
from other nations, who, like China, India, Russia and others, still
preserve a rational agricultural life.
And it is these parasitical nations and their activity that you
are invited to imitate by the men of the Reform party !
Constitutions, protective tariffs, standing armies, all this to-
gether has rendered the Western nations what they are — people
who have abandoned agriculture and become unused to it, occupied
in towns and factories in the production of articles for the most
part unnecessary, people who with their armies are adapted only to
every kind of violence and robbery. However brilliant their
position may appear at first sight, it is a desperate one, and they
must inevitably perish if they do not change the whole, structure of
their life, founded as it now is on deceit and the plunder and
pillage of the agricultural nations.
To imitate Western nations, being frightened by their insolence
and power, would be the same as if a rational undepraved
industrious man were to imitate a spendthrift insolent ruffian who
has lost the habit of work and was assaulting him, i,e, in order to
LETTER TO A CHINESE GENTLEMAN. 85
successfully oppose an immoral blackguard to become a similar
immoral blackguard oneself.
The Chinese should not imitate Western nations, but profit by
their example in order to avoid falling into the same desperate
straits.
All that the Western nations are doing can and should be an
example for the Eastern ones, — not, however, an example of what
they should do, but of what they should not do under any
consideration whatever.
VIL
To follow the way of the Western nations means to go the way
to certain ruin. But also to remain in the position in which the
Russians in Russia, the Persians in Persia, the Turks in Turkey,
and the Chinese in China are is also impossible. But for you, the
Chinese, it is particularly obviously impossible, because you
remaining with your love of peace in the position of a State without
an army amidst armed States, which are unable to exist
independently, will inevitably be subject to plunder and seizure
which these States are compelled to have recourse to for their
maintenance.
What, then, is to be done ?
For us Russians I know, I most undoubtedly know, what we
Russians should not do and what we should do in order to free
ourselves from the evils from which we are suffering, and, not to
fall into still worse ones. We Russians first of all should not obey
the existing authorities, but we also should not do that which is
being attempted amongst us by unenlightened people, as amongst
you, by the party of reform, — we should not imitate the West : we
should not substitute one Power for another and organise a
constitution, whether it be monarchial or republican. This for
certain we should not do, because it would necessarily bring us to
the same calamitous position in which the Western nations are
placed. But we should and can do only one thing, and that the
S6 LETTER TO A CHINESE GENTLEMAN.
most simple : live a peaceful agricultural life, bearing the acts of
violence which may be perpetrated upon us without struggling
against them and without participating in them. The same thing^
I presume, and with yet stronger reasons, should you Chinese do in
order not only to free yourselves from the seizures of your land and
the plunder which the European nations subject you to, but also
from the unreasonable demands of your Government which exacts
from you actions contrary to your moral teaching and
consciousness.
Only adhere to that liberty which consists in following the
rational way of life, z.e.y Tao, and of themselves will be abolished
all the calamities which your officials cause you, and your
oppression and plunder by Europeans will become impossibk.
You will free yourselves from your officials by not fulfilling their
demands, and, above all, by not obeying, you will cease to con-
tribute to the oppression and plunder of each other. You will free
yourselves from plunder on the part of Europeans by keeping the
Tao, and not recognising yourselves as belonging to any State, or as
being responsible for the deeds committed by your Government.
All the seizures and plunder you are subject to from European
nations take place only because there exists a Government of
which you recognise yourselves as subjects. If there were no
Chinese Government, foreign nations would have no pretext,
under guise of international relations, to commit their atrocities.
And if, by refusing to obey your Government, you will cease to
encourage foreign Powers in their acts of violence against you : if
you do not serve the Government, either in private, or State, or
military service— then there will not exist all those calamities
from which you suffer.
VIIL
In order to free oneself from the evil one should not fight with
its consequences : the abuses of Governments, the seizures and
plunders of neighbouring nations, — but with the root of the evil ;
LETTER TO A CHINESE GENTLEMAN. 87
with the relations in which the people have placed themselves
towards human authority. If the people recognise human power
as higher than the power of God, higher than the law (Tao), then
the people will always be slaves and the more so the more complex
their organisation of Power (such as a constitutional one) which
they institute and to which they submit. Only those people can
be free for whom the law of God (Tao) is the sole supreme law to
which all others should be subordinated.
IX.
Individuals and societies are always in a transitory state from
one age to another, but there arc times when these transitions both
for individuals and for societies are especially apparent and vividly
realised. As it happens with a man who has suddenly come to
feel that he can no longer continue a childish life, so also in the life
of nations there come periods when societies can no longer
continue to live as they did, and they realise the necessity of
changing their habits, their organisation and activity. And it is
such a period of transition from childhood to manhood that, as it
appears to me, all nations are now passing through, the Eastern as
well as the Western. This transition consists in the necessity of
freeing themselves from human authority which has become
unbearable, and of the establishment of life on foundations other
than human power.
And this task is, I think, by historical fate predestined precisely
to the Eastern nations.
The Eastern nations are placed for this purpose in especially
happy conditions, not having yet abandoned agriculture, not being
yet depraved by military, constitutional and industrial life, and not
having yet lost faith in the necessity of the supreme law of Heaven
or God, they are standing at the parting of the ways from which the
European nations have long ago turned, on to the false way in which
liberation from human authority has become particularly difficult.*
* As to why this is so I have stated in detail in my article entitled, " The
Significance of the Russian Revolution."
88 LETTER TO A CHINESE GENTLEMAN.
And therefore, Eastern nations seeing all the calamity of the West-
ern peoples, should naturally endeavour to free themselves from the
error of human authority, not by that artificial and delusive method
consisting in the imaginary limitation of power, and in representa-
tion by which Western nations have endeavoured to free themselves,
but should solve the problem of Power by another more radical and
simple plan. And this plan of itself appeals to those who have not
yet lost faith in the supreme, binding law of Heaven or God, the law
of Tao. It consists merely in the following of this law which
excludes the possibility of obeying human authority.
If the Chinese people were only to continue to live, as they
have formerly lived, a peaceful industrious agricultural lite,
following in their conduct the principles of their three religions :
Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, all three in their basis coinciding :
Confucianism in the liberation from all human authority, Taoism in
not doing to others what one does not wish done to oneself, and
Buddhism in love towards all men and all living beings, then
of themselves would disappear all those calamities from which
they now suffer, and no Powers could overcome them.
The task which, according to my opinion, is now pending not
only for China but for all the Eastern nations, does not merely
consist in freeing themselves from the evils they suffer from their
own Governments and foreign nations, but in pointing out to all
nations the issue out of the transitory position in which they all
are.
And there is and can be no other issue than the liberation of
oneself fron human authority, and submission to the divine
authority.
LOVE AND MALCOMSON, PRINTERS, 4 & 5, DEAN ST., HIGH HOLBORN, W.C.
Zhe 3ftee Hge pxc^s.
CHRISTCHURCH, HANTS.
WAR
A PEACE ALBUM.
Pictures by
EMILE HOLAREK,
with readings on the subject by
LEO TOLSTOY
and others.
Edited by V. Tchertkoff,
A collection of realistic and allegorical pictures
representing the horrors of War and its an-
tagonism to Christianity. Useful to Peace and
Reform Societies. Special Terms arranged.
Red Covers, 34 pages, 12 x 10,
Price One Penny ; Post Free, Twopence.
Second Edition.
Better Edition, same size, red covers, thick paper, tinted
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Zhc Jfvee Hge press.
CHRISTCHURCH, HANTS.
TOLSTOY
ON
SHAKESPEARE.
I. '* Shakespeare and the Drama,"
By Leo Tolstoy.
II. " Shakespeare and the Working Classes."
By E. H. Crosby
III. Mr. G. Bernard Shaw on Shakespeare.
IV. The Press against Shakespeare.
A criticism by Tolstoy of Shakespeare's dramatic and literary
character. Includes an article by E. H. Crosby on Shakespeare's
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With new portrait (1906), 128 pages, price 6d., by post 7d.
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